It felt like the right time to come back to my neglected rudder, so I returned to the soul-crushing process of rolling the leading edges. I managed to bend the top part as closely into place as I could before I went mad.
The rivet at the top of the small section is tricky. It's so close to the horn that there isn't enough room for the rivet puller to fit while keeping the head of the rivet flush to the skin. I fabricated the pulled rivet wedge mentioned in the manual and used that to get this rivet set.
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| I cut off a piece of the trailing edge wedge included in the practice kit (I haven't touched it since I started working on the empennage) to fabricate the wedge. |
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| A slight bend to the mandrel allows the puller to stay flush with the wedge, which keeps the rivet head flush with the skin. |
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| Not bad! Although all that bending and rolling seems to have scratched off a little primer from the counterbalance rib... |
The most difficult part of each bend is knowing how far to roll before you've rolled enough. Too often I'd use a ton of force and bend the part way further than it looked like it would need to go but it still wasn't enough.
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| Bends with just the pipe... |
The manual does say that the pipe is just to get the bend started and you're supposed to complete the bend by hand. I finally went at it with bare hands and brute force and managed to get it roughly into position.
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| ...and after further coaxing. |
At this point the holes were close enough that I could pull them a just a bit closer together and cleco them in place.
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| After hours of struggling, the bottom part was finally in place. |
The rivets gave me a little trouble when initially fitting them into their holes. I had reamed the holes to #30 before priming, so primer had since gotten into the holes and reduced the diameter enough to make it a tight fit for some rivets. After struggling with one rivet for a couple minutes I took it out and noticed how scuffed up it was getting.
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| Scuffed rivet on the left, fresh one on the right. |
Instead of messing up the rivets any further by trying to force them in, I did what I should have done from the beginning and reamed the holes to ensure an easy fit for each rivet. Many pulled rivets later, I had a (mostly) completed rudder!
