Today I continued to work on the rudder. I read somewhere that adventure is tragedy avoided. Today was an adventure. I went back to the skin stiffners and worked on the three I had worked yesterday. I wanted to make sure they fit next to the spar with no contact. I used a Dremel tool to take off about 1/64th of material and I am happy with the results. Next I worked on the rudder horn support. It had to be trimmed to fit between the rudder horn and the lower rib. Fortunately I had read someone else's web site about trimming it too much and having the rivet holes end up out of tolerance. Another mistake avoided. If you are planning on building an RV-7 (or any kit for that matter) spend the time to research other consturction web sites. I have spent hours reading and reviewing other RV-7 web sites learning from other's mistakes. The Yahoo support groups are another great location for tips and lessons learned.
There are three pieces that need to be fabricated at this stage. One is a simple shim and the other two are strips that attach to the lower rib. This last two will be used to attach the fiberglass bottom of the rudder. None of the three were difficult to make (no bends to calculate) just takes time.
The final work of the day was to cleco everything together to ensure proper fit and drill to match all of the remaining rivet holes. There are almost three hundred rivets on the rudder skin. That is a lot of rivet holes to cleco, drill, deburr and countersink / dimple. I can only imagine working on the wings. After drilling to match I took everything apart and went to work deburring and dimpling the rudder structure. Although the plans have you complete a few other tasks before priming I went ahead and prepped, cleaned and primed the rudder structure components.
Unfortunately, I an scheduled to work the next seventeen days straight. No more progress until next month.
Primed ready for final assembly
Two long strips frabricated and shim (in background)
