Joshua's RV-9A Project

Finished dimpling the rudder skins & stiffeners tonight.  It seems that you’re intended to put the stiffeners on the skins before drilling the skins to the ribs & such, so those need to be etched and primed.  I also need to get a decent backriveting plate to carry on.  I read through the rest of the rudder instructions and decided that it would be safe to do the skeleton fabrication up to the skin attach point, so I did some match drilling of components and rib fluting, etc.  I managed to cleco together some interesting-looking assemblies, such as the spar/rudder horn/brace junction at the bottom where the control cables attach for the rudder.  Impressive!  I also worked on the top end, at the counterbalance.  I had some trouble getting holes to line up between the R-912 counterbalance rib and the associated skin, so decided to flute the nose flange of that rib to draw the holes together…bad move.  I ended up cracking the rib flange about half of its width in two places.  I determined that I could radius & file out a notch between the holes and create a two tabs.  I roughed this out and took some pictures; I will ask advice of my TC (who is coming to visit on Sunday afternoon) and/or the factory before proceeding with this part.  The rib is $9.34 from Van’s if it needs to be replaced.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 29th, 2007 at 9:33 pm and is filed under Rudder. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.