6 hours.
Today was both productive and frustrating. The intent was to finish up all things rudder, which didn’t happen, but got pretty close.
I spent a bit of time making some more clearance between the rudder/elevator tips and their corresponding stabilizer tips. To get a perfectly matched arc shape, I wrapped successive layers of coarse-grit sandpaper around the tip and counterweight, and swinging the part through its travel sanded the stabilizer tip into the shape I needed. Easy. But the main focus of the day was the rudder, both wiring and attaching the rudder bottom.
First thing I needed to do was set up the rudder bottom attach, which involved putting platenuts on the attach strips so I can remove the rudder bottom later if I need to. This was a time-consuming process, which does not fit well with my “final assembly” ethic. It needed to be done, along with wiring the tail lamp and strobe. That went better than expected, but I had to run a ground wire for the tail lamp, which I’d forgotten to do the whole time I was working on stuff back there.
Platenuts. But not many.
I have no idea why I took this shot. But this is right about when it started to go south. When I put the vertical stabilizer on, I put it on with the bolt heads on the inside of the fuselage, with the threads pointing aft. When I put the rudder on and tried to fit the rudder bottom to it, there was no way in hell the rudder bottom was going to fit. So I started shaving down the fiberglass on the rudder bottom, which helped. The major issue was that with the bolts pointed in the wrong direction, the rudder bottom interfered with the center bolt.
Now, this is where you’re saying “turn the bolts around, dude.” If you had said that when I ran into this problem, it would have helped. But no, yours truly had to do it the hard way. I removed the rudder, and figured, hey, I’ll just let the rod end bearings, the ones holding the rudder to the stabilizer, out a bit and see if I can clear those threads. Nope. Several tries. Nope. Without my fancy rod-end-bearing tool, even. Nope. After a few rounds of this, I smartened up and flipped the bolts around, and everything clears just fine. But now my rudder is way out of alignment, and even though it travels nicely and freely, there’s much bigger gap at the bottom than there is at the top and this will not do.
The good news is that the tail lamp works fine, no smoke, no blown fuses. The strobe doesn’t, but that’s probably because the strobe pack was last switched on and run some time during the Bush administration and the capacitors are hosed. I’ll be needing a replacement, and soon, because the wings are going to go on and I’ll need to test that all the blinkenlights work.
So for next time, bring the fancy rod end bearing tool (a couple of scrap pieces of PVC pipe).
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