Movng towards the (trailing) edge

Sunday 6th April 2008 (7hr 15min)

Riveted rudder except skin-tip & root ribs - last 3 rivets top and bottom. Prepared alu angle and match drilled to rudder trailing edge. Riveted left and right elevator tip and root ribs top and bottom to skins. Cleaned trailing edge parts of rudder in preparation for tank sealant. Installed rudder counterweight.

I spent the day finishing all the remaining jobs on the rudder and both elevators to get them ready for prosealing the trailing edge. ,

Earlier, Vans had sent me the 3.5oz size in the cartridge instead of the 1 oz size that I had ordered. From all I had heard, this job is very messy so the cartridge format of the 3.5 oz seemed like a good idea and I decided to order the dispenser gun that goes with it. By the way, the only difference between the gun that Vans sells and the cheapest gun you can get at your local hardware store is in the diameter of the disk at the head of the plunger. If I had it to do again, I would find a way of reducing the diamater of this disk on a cheap gun until it fitted into the end of the proseal cartridge.

The downside of the cartridge is that it is all mixed at the same time and goes off at the same time so you have to have everything that you want to use it for set up and ready at the same time. I have a heavy aluminium angle set into the edge of one of my worktables but this was not going to be enough to do both elevator trailing edges and the rudder trailing at the same time so I had bought an extra 8' length of 35mm x 35mm x4mm aluminium angle. I cut a piece off this to suit the length of the trailing edge of the rudder and match-drilled it to the existing holes in the skins and trailing edge web.

Counterbalance & corrections

Saturday 15th March 2008 (2hr 40min)

Dimpled holes in the end tabs of the trim tab. Riveted the counterbalance assembly for both elevators. Riveted rudder counterbalance assembly. Drilled out mashed rivets on rudder skins and elevator skins and re-riveted them.

I borrowed a long-nose no-hole yoke and a longeron yoke from my pal Bryan (QB7). I really did not fancy bucking inside a restricted space such as the rudder counterbalance arm. These yokes made the job easy. The only difficulty was in getting the longeron yoke over both flanges of the elevator counterbalance arm. The trick here was to remove one of the rivet sets. There is plenty of space to put it back in once the yoke is in place inside the flanges.