Saturday, January 3, 2015

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.  


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