While the floorboards were off for my conditional inspection, I pulled the rudder pedal control assembly in order to accomplish reinforcement of the rudder lever arms as suggested by Avipro. I found no cracks to be present and the sides of the channel welds already were connected to the flange weld. I only needed to weld each end of the tube to the inner surface of the lever arm. I used gas welding and clamped a square of 18 gauge copper sheet to the outside surface at the weld area in order to act as a heat sink so as to avoid cutting through the relatively thin lever arm steel.
To touch up the paint, I wire brushed the burnt paint and used Ford Light Grey tractor enamel, available at most tractor supply stores, which is a pretty close match to the Avipro gray, and avoided the hassle of epoxy priming and painting.
