Brief Description: Trimmed blue plastic and worked on stiffeners.
Today I started building the rudder. In the morning I spent an hour trimming the blue plastic off the rivet lines with a straight edge steel rule and a soldering iron. After doing this I read on VAF that using a steel rule acts as a heat sink and doesn't work as well as using a wooden ruler. This process takes a lot of time with minimal results and a lot of guys on the web say they wouldn't do it on their next plane. I might just free hand it from now on like I did on the Horizontal Stab which would save a lot of time and still protect the skins while handling them.
In the evening I spent a couple hours trimming the stiffeners to the correct length and tapering the trailing edges with a tin snips and grinder with the scotchbrite wheel. This was tedious work but not too difficult. After the stiffeners were done I started match drilling them to the skins. For this process you drill right into the table top and then cleco them down flat. This is why it is important to have a flat table with a soft surface like mine of MDF. The table acts like a jig and holds everything flat and tight. It got late so I went to bed.
