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Nate's RV-7 Site
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Date:  10-21-2019
Number of Hours:  2.50
Manual Reference:  Sect 6-7
Brief Description:  Riveting the Trailing Edge of the Rudder

I finally got up the courage to work on a part I'd rather been dreading, riveting the rudder trailing edge. Recenty I prosealed the trailing edge, and I gave it over a week to dry. Really it only needed one or two days, but I kept putting off this last step until I realized that I needed the shop space my rudder was taking up, so there was no better time than now to address the rudder.

Recently I started thinking about how best to attack this problem, when I saw that cleaveland Tool had created a tool just for this job. It was a squeezer set milled to six degress to fit right on the rudder without slipping. Seeing that this was a solution I could live with, using a squeezer versus the rivet gun I jumped at it. Unfortuneatly this meant all of my work installing angle stock to the workbench was moot, but innovation often leaves many good ideas in the scrap heap.

Most of my time was spent cleaning up the proseal in the dimples, after removing the double angle stock braces that held the assempbly together. I used MEK alternate in a well ventilated garage to clean out all of the dried proseal, then used a ravor to clean the excess proseal that oozed out of the trailing edge. After that, I used the deburring tool to clean out the rivet holes that had proseal in them and then slid in the rivets.

The tool worked acceptably. I elected to alternate all of the rivets and slowly work my way alternating between the left and the right right sides, top and bottom of the rudder to equally distribute the pressure to avoid bending the rudder trailing edge. I got most of my shop heads perfectly flush with the skin, but a few were a little high, yet they were all acceptable. I decided not to push it once the shop heads were acceptable because I just didn't want to chance ruing the part, and again, the shop heads were acceptable.

I was most worried about bending the trailing edge. Because the trailing edge was thicker than I originally thought, because of the amount of proseal that I used, it was hard to sight
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