Joining Rudder Skins

Tonight was an exciting night! We started the night by finishing the remaining work needed for the rudder trim tab: attaching nutplates for the inspection plate, and cutting a C-shaped notch out of the R rudder skin to provide room for the control horn and servo linkage. The resulting internals look similar to what they looked like last night, but now the rudder is finally ready to continue with the assembly process:

Next came the fun part... mixing up some Proseal and riveting the two rudder skins together! From all the posts I've read online about this stuff, I can truly say I was 100% prepared to deal with it, and it really wasn't as bad as I was expecting. I put a light coat on the trailing edge of the L rudder skin, added the wedge, and then put another coat on the wedge. I used a popsicle stick to spread it out evenly across the surfaces, and I don't think I made too terribly big of a mess. Any mess that I did make seemed to clean up pretty easily with acetone. While the Proseal was drying, we had to quickly rivet the internal structure of the rudder together using pop rivets. My friends Brannen and Becca were visiting, and took these pics of the process:

Putting the pop rivets into place in one of the stiffeners.

Setting the rivets using the pneumatic gun.

Finishing up the closing of the rudder.

The rudder, just after riveting the stiffeners together but before clecoing and weighting the trailing edge.

Now, we wait! After this last pic was taken, we clecoed the trailing edge together and placed weighted boards (and a whole line of clothes pins) along the edge to hold it in place. The Proseal now needs two days to cure, after which we'll rivet the trailing edge together and finish the rest of the rudder! In the meantime, we might start on the HS, but we'll see how things go... the weather is supposed to be nice tomorrow, maybe we'll go flying instead :-)