Rudder time

This post covers work undertaken on one short session on one night during the week and a good solid day in the ACF today.What's the saying, many short steps make a journey.............

Rudder time! This is a reasonably important control device in an aircraft, it delivers up left and right yaw around a horizontal axis front to rear.

The rudder spar caps and hinges are temporarily clecoed  to the rudder spar and the fit of the hinges to the vertical stabilizer is checked.  Following match drilling and deburring of all parts, the the spar caps, hinges and first rib are riveted together, just like this.

After the spar caps are riveted in place, the bottom rib is riveted to the control horn and the control horn with rib  is riveted to the rudder spar. It looks like this.

The rest of the ribs are clecoed to the spar

  and riveted.

The next job is to fit the skeleton inside the rudder skin and cleco in place and rivet. Assistant Aircraft Constructor Paul visited the ACF at this point  and pulled the rivets.

This is the rudder complete except for the fiberglass fairing that closes up the top. That gets done later.

Time still available,  Paul and I made a start on the Anti-servo Tab. There are two of them, left and right. This is a section of the tailplane that moves up and down in small increments (known as 'trim') that enables fine adjustment of the nose up or nose down attitude of the aircraft in flight.

After deburring of all edges and holes of all parts, we fitted the ribs into the the skins,  clecoed the top skins  in place,

 and riveted them.

This is the riveting complete.

The control horns are prepared are riveted to the inboard end spars.

The spars are clecoed to the upper skin

and riveted in place.

And that seemed an appropriate place to pull stumps for today. All in all, a good and productive days work. The next job is to fabricate and fit the hinges and rivet the bottom skin.

Am I enjoying this? Yes!