Brief Description: Rudder Assembly and Horizontal Stabilizer Assembly
I kept plugging away on the Rudder today. I fitted the bottom ribs and match drilled the holes.
Here's the frustrating part of building an airplane.
Out of the box, the rudder horn (R-1005) is ugly. It's very thick aluminum, it has ugly stamp marks, and very sharp edges. You can make a career cleaning up the horn and getting it ready for the plane. So I spent nearly three hours working on this part and when I finished it was beautiful!
The next step called for countersinking some holes.
I did a great job on all of the holes and things were going great. That's when I messed up the final hole. The cage of the microstop countersink rode up on a bend in the horn and now I had an oval that was too deep. Some people thought I could get away with it, but it's better safe than sorry. (Especially with a part that connects the stick to a control surface. So I ordered a new one and I can't tell you how much I'm looking forward to doing the entire process again.
This time I'm taking the cage of the countersink tool and I'm going to use the stops on a drill press to limit the depth. It should come out great.
This pretty much stopped the work on the Rudder, so I moved on to the Horizontal Stabilizer. I deburred the rear spar and the doubler. It looks great. There were some sizable scratches in the spar and I took the time to remove them with a scotchbrite wheel on a die grinder, followed by some hand scrubbing with a scotchbrite pad. They came out fine. Finally, I sprayed some alodine on the areas, just to protect the exposed aluminum.
Here's the R-1005! Man it looks nice.
But not if you look a little closer. The countersink cage rode up on the curve and caused the oval.
Here's what it looks like with a rivet sitting in the hole. - Time to order another one.
