Sunday, March 9, 2014

Empennage - Rudder - Day 1

Well, after making a lot of great progress on VS Day 1, I feel like I've slowed down a little bit today. Staying up way too late last night finishing up this website, combined with the loss of an hour with daylight savings definitely didn't help. I have a feeling like there will be plenty more days like yesterday, and plenty more days like today yet to come!

So I decided to keep the skin off the vertical stabilizer for now and move on to the rudder. I'm still wanting to get a little more comfortable with the whole process and figured it won't hurt anything to leave them separate for now, and rivet it together another time. So... on to Section 7 - Rudder!

R-1003, R-1004, R-1010, and R-1015 parts, raw

The beginning of Section 7 involved quite a bit of metalwork. The top and bottom ribs needed to be separated from their raw stamped parts, along with the shear clips and each of the seven stiffeners needed to be cut to different lengths. Then each piece needed the usual deburring which seemed to take quite a while with all the little resulting parts. Here is what this same pile of parts became after about 3 hours:

R-1003, R-1004, R-1010, and R-1015 parts, cut and deburred

It was about at this point that my good friends Alec and Cody showed up to check out the project. It was great to do a little show and tell over the semi-complete VS, and walk through the whole process that I am just beginning to get the feel of. I've told all my friends that throughout this process I'm implementing an open-door policy: anyone who wants to come watch is more than welcome to do so, but they'll have to help out (at least a little)! So:

Never too cautious, Alec agreed to help by peeling the protective layer from the R-1002 spar assembly :-)

The rest of today's work was pretty straightforward: a little deburring work on the rudder horn and striker plates, and then clecoing all these parts together. It yielded this nifty piece of work:

That's actually pretty much it for today! Lots more work to do on the rudder, and still need to rivet on the VS skin at some point... Hopefully I'll get in a few hours each night throughout this week!