Rudder Assembly Ongoing - 3.5 hours

I decided to put some work into assembling the rudder. I can only rivet one side of the skins so that the MD-RA can inspect it before I closed it up. All in all, the skins when on extremely nice and I cleco'd the trailing edge on. I set up the squeezer and I set the majority of rivets on the rudder. All in all it went really well. I ended up having to drill out and re-set 3 rivets that I was not happy with. One rivet at the very top gave me quite a bit of brain damage. I set too short a rivet (not paying attention). So I drilled it out to #30 and tried to set an oops rivet but it started to bend. So I drilled out the oops rivet. Time to think...I might need to buck this rivet as I do not want to risk bending it and having to drill it out again.

Rudder assembly ongoing - 3.5 hours

I started off with dimpling the rudder skins and the counterbalance rib and skin. Then I started in setting the two rivets on either side of the bottom nut plate. I just was not pleased as the head was angled and I chose to try again. Of course since the material was so thick getting the rivet out was impossible without drilling it out. Now the holes where too large. So I opted to go up a rivet size (to #5) and used a #21 drill on the hole. Well..after measuring the edge distance from the reinforcement plate to the center of the hole is 0.241"....closer than the minimum recommendation for the rivet size. Crap! Well time to reason it out. The edge distance issue only exists on the thicker reinforcement plate so I might be ok...I will send an email to Van's and double check if all is good (I will also get confirmation of the oblong hole on the HS from my Dec 22/14 build day) . I decided to forge ahead with setting the remaining rivets.

I then riveted the counterbalance rib onto the spar and then cleco'd/riveted the counterbalance skin. I need to order a set of 120deg 1/8"dies for the CS4-4 pop rivets before I can proceed any further on the rudder.  

Started Rudder assembly - 2.5 hours

Not wanting to face the bitter cold in the garage, I decided to dig out my small air compressor and set up in the basement. I managed to log a few hours with the assembly of the rudder. I dimpled the spar and then set the rivets on the reinforcement plates and nutplates. I finished the top two reinforcement plates and started the bottom one.