After several weeks of (real) work for me, and lots of great (airplane) prep work by Dad, we returned to the Big Project. When we last left the horizontal and vertical stabs, we had several un-riveted holes that we weren’t able to reach, most notably the ones closest to the leading edges.

So, we picked up a 4″ no-hole yoke from Avery Tools, and with this we were able to squeeze those tight-quarters rivet placements. And if the photo below were at all legible, and/or there wasn’t a bookshelf in the way, you’d see that, yes, we do in fact have a set of completed tail feathers.

We then jumped right into riveting the stiffeners to the rudder skin, since Dad had spent the last several weeks doing the trimming, drilling, dimpling, deburring of the rudder components. We used the C-frame backriveting technique for most of this job, but found that is was not quite as foolproof as we would have liked — we still ended up with some clubbed rivets.

We’ve since decided that the thin skins of the moveable surfaces, coupled with #40 holes and dimples, cause the rivets to move around a little too much in their holes, resulting in some of them bending over while driving. We might try a slightly smaller drill bit (#41?) next time.

We then moved on to bending the rudder trailing edge with the great 2×8 press brake that Dad fabricated (I’ll get some pictures of that process when we do the elevators), and we were pleasantly surprised with the results. Following the advice of several other builders, we taped a wooden dowel to the inside of the trailing edge to ensure that we got the proper bend radius.

Finally, we assembled and drilled the rudder understructure, and prepped the parts for priming.

Of course, no airplane work session can be without its pitfalls and heartbreak, and this one was no different. While match drilling the rudder understructure, we noticed that we’d over-trimmed the R-710 rudder horn brace, pictured above. This caused our drilled holes to be too close to the top edge (the bottom edge in the picture) to meet minimum edge distance requirements for a 3/32 rivet.

After much debate and hand-wringing, we decided to order a replacement part, and we moved on to priming and riveting what we could of the rudder skeleton.

Oh yeah, and last but not least, here’s a picture of me, doing … something.