Today I finished riveting the rudder together. All that’s left is the do the fiberglass fairings. Vans has you circle back at the end and do the fairings on all the control surfaces last. I like that idea, I want the limit the number of times I have to mess around with fiberglass. Next up is the Horizontal Stabilizer.
The rudder all riveted together Another picture of the rudder all riveted together
Today I finished dimpling the rudder parts and countersunk the trailing edge wedge. Next I back riveted the rudder ribs halves on to the corresponding skin. Tomorrow I’ll tackle the dredged trailing edge wedge riveting
A bazillion countersinks had to be machined into both sides of the wedge The rib halves and shear clips riveted to the skin
Today I started the day off with a priming session. I got all of the rudder parts primed. Then I did some fabricating work on the trailing edge wedge. After that, it was on to dimpling the rudder skins and stiffeners. I’ve got a bit more dimpling to do and then it’s on to riveting it all together.
Rudder skins primed Rudder stiffeners are primed Rudder spar and doublers primed Rudder doublers and nutplates riveted to the spar Rudder skins dimpled
Tonight I continued work on the rudder. It was mostly more deburring (I had to debur the large skins) and some minor drilling operatings. Tomorrow I’m going to get everything primed.
Most of the rudder parts all deburred and ready to be primed A few more parts waiting to be primed.
Tonight I got started on the rudder. The first few steps are to some part trimming and a lot of deburring. That took up most of the night. Tomorrow should be a little more exciting ;)
Many of the parts tonight came attached together and had to be cut apart, trimmed and deburred An example of some of the trimming. Van's had really made the tasks pretty trivial with the RV-14.