After over 6 months of postponing the rolling of the rudder leading edges, we finally did it (following the rolling of the elevator leading edges):
Rolling the leading edges
Rolling the leading edges (pipe + improvised extension with lever)
and riveted it:
Completed rudder, with rolled and riveted leading edges
The last remaining step was attaching the counterweight, which involves bending the skin around it:
Bent skins around the counterweight
then securing it with screws:
Installed counterweight
Installed counterweight
With this, the rudder itself is complete!
Now to the one gotcha - I had installed a nutplate on the vertical stabilizer to attach the bonding strap. When I did a test fit between the rudder and the VS, however, it became clear that the clearance between the two is not enough for the screw and washers required :/
Not enough clearance for the bonding strap screw :/
Technically I only have to worry about this in the "Empennage Assembly" section, but the two solutions I see are to either open up the VS again and install a nut plate closer to the attachment gap (though it doesn't seem to have enough room anyway) or to remove a small section of the rolled leading edge to allow the clearance required. It seems Mouser went with the latter (per "29 Nov 2009" post).
Time lapse:
Total rudder time: 53.9h Total rudder rivets: 503 Total empennage time: 496h Total empennage rivets: 3707
I finally got back to the rudder. I had previously assembled the spar and top rib before I ran out of rivets:
Rudder spar riveted in place
Today (now with rivets to spare) I riveted the counterbalance rib and the trailing edge:
Riveted trailing edge
"Acorn sitting in a dimple"
One of the main concerns in the manual is keeping the trailing edge straight (not bowed), which I think I managed to do:
Looks straight to me
A lot of the riveting work was made easier by a benchtop back riveting plate mount that I inherited from another RV builder - that made it trivial to support the whole rudder while back-riveting the edge:
Also, while doing this, a coworker came over and wanted to help, so he was deburring parts for the elevator.
Next step for the rudder is to bend the leading edges and install the counterbalance weight.
In parallel with the work on the rudder and vertical stabilizer, I've been slowly making progress on the horizontal stabilizer. After the skins were primed, I dimpled them, primed the spars, and finally started assembling the spars:
Horizontal stabilizer spars
I guess the only challenging part was to interpret and follow this riveting diagram:
(not really that bad, but you do end up checking it twice before setting each rivet)
The next steps are to start assembling the ribs/spars/stringers together, but most of those haven't been primed yet.
Time lapse:
Total horizontal stabilizer time: 83.5h Total horizontal stabilizer rivets: 178
I finished preparing the rudder for closing down, which involved installing a nutplate on the spar for bonding, which I installed close to one of the attachment nutplates in order to take advantage of both its doubler and later the opening through the rolled leading edge (for the bonding strap):
Nut plates: smaller for bonding and larger for attachment
We then proceeded to applying the sealant and join the two skins. The sealant instructions look very very cryptic - dasher rod? ram rod? Luckily, I found this RV-12 blog which literally translates them to something understandable :) Sealant mixed and applied, we proceeded to rivet the two skins together while rolling the top skin up (no pictures of the process - we were too busy and messy to play with cameras - but it's in the time lapse):
Fully join rudder skins (including the bottom rib)
Weights on the trailing edge to hold the sealant and skins together
That also involved riveting the two skins together:
Pop rivets joining the two skins together
Time lapse:
If it appears that one part of the video is going faster than another, that's because it is - I accidentally recorded a full day of work in regular 1080p 30fps mode - I sped that up 8x, but that's still slower than the 2fps I usually record time lapse in.
Over the last few days, I finished the rudder skins, and am now ready to apply sealant and rivet them together:
Rudder skins ready to be attached to each other
To remove the blue vinyl only from the rows of rivets, we modified a soldering iron tip to be hemispherical (by sanding it down), and that did the trick of burning away lines of the vinyl without scratching the metal underneath:
Vinyl-removing soldering-iron tip
After removing the vinyl strips, I started back riveting the skins, and found two issues - first, the rivets seemed to be too short (the shop head was below tolerance); also, most of them had one side (the side closest to the stiffener) improperly set:
Bad, bad rivets. No donut for you.
The bad corner turned out to be because of the back riveting set I was using (from ATS), which has a very large plastic piece around the actual setting surface - I solved this by getting one from Cleaveland, which has a much smaller protection (on the down side, it's harder to ensure you're at a right angle to the surface with the new one):
ATS (right) vs Cleaveland (left) back riveting sets
The short rivets appear to be because I'm using the substructure dimple die, so the dimple is actually higher. Changing the AD3-3 for AD3-3.5 rivets gave me just enough length to make proper shop heads.
Just enough of the rivet sticking out, if I use a half-size larger than indicated
I then set all the back rivets on the left skin's stiffeners:
Riveted stiffeners!
And then used a platenut drill jig and installed the nut plates for the static wicks:
Static wicks installed
And finally, installed the static wicks themselves:
Full rudder skin with riveted stiffeners and static wicks
The right skin followed pretty much the same procedure (minus the static wicks):
Marked regions of vinyl to remove
Clean vinyl cut
Installed stiffeners and shear clips on right skin
On the right skin, also installed the shear clips and the horn:
Installed shear clips
Shear clip, installed with LP4-3 pop rivets
Installing the horn was quite trivial using the squeezer - that is, until I got to the very last rivet:
No room!
There's just no room to use the squeezer (even the thin-nosed one). I tried (with my wife helping lift the other side a bit, and the result was a cracked shop head:
Cracked rivet head
At this point I gave up, removed the rivet with the cracked head, and installed a cherrymax (same one that's recommended for use later, on the other side):
Screw it, I used a CherryMax instead
The next steps are a little annoying to execute in that they involve sealant along the trailing edge (and all have to be performed during the 2 hours before the sealant stiffens).
Time lapse:
Total rudder time: 37.3h Total rudder rivets: 199 / 402
With only a few unprimed parts from the rudder, we spent most of Friday priming parts, including all the smaller remaining parts of the rudder (2 tabs, the horn and 3 stiffeners), both rudder skins and both horizontal stabilizer skins.
For the horizontal stabilizer skins, I used my super-advanced method to keep the markings after the PreKote etching - that is, taking pictures then re-marking before applying the primer. The marks were still visible through the primer.
Markings before priming
Faint marking after priming
Now after the primer cures I'll go back to riveting the rudder, including installing the static wicks.
Time lapse:
Total rudder time: 24.6h Total horizontal stabilizer time: 69.7h
We dimpled all the rudder parts which were already primed:
I'm not Santa, but I had a little helper
Lots of dimpled parts
Riveted rudder rib
Spar nut plate for attaching rudder to vertical stabilizer
Before I could continue the rudder assembly, I needed to prime a few remaining parts (3 stiffeners, the side of the other spar doubler and the rudder horn) - another post will cover the priming.
Drilled through all of the rudder skin, deburred all the holes, machine-countersunk the trailing edge, and it's now ready for the primer (which I'm still waiting for).
All drilled!
Disassembling for deburring
Countersinking the trailing edge
I'll probably move slower until after the 24th, as I have an upcoming checkride that I want to study for.
I finished preparing the rudder for closing down, which involved installing a nutplate on the spar for bonding, which I installed close to one of the attachment nutplates in order to take advantage of both its doubler and later the opening through the rolled leading edge (for the bonding strap):
