October 13, 2015
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| (Update: December 2016, I built a second rudder. The first had a twist that I was never happy with. I describe the details further in the "mistakes page" of this blog) |
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| The first part of rudder construction involves separating the pre-formed rudder stiffeners . There are two pieces formed from one piece of material. Most just involve using snips to separate. |
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| After cutting with the snips, I used the belt sander to remove the "connection tabs" that were left behind after cutting the parts with the snips. All edges were then final de-burred using a file and scotch brite wheel. |
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| So far the rudder involves a little more "shaping" of the parts than the vertical; stab required. Mostly the stiffeners. Here's the stiffeners on the right. Still need de-burred. |
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| Here's all the parts for the rudder..minus the skin. |
October 16, 2015
Initial rudder assembly.
It's still fun for me (still a newbie I guess), to take a few parts that don't look like anything airplane related, follow a few directions (pictures included:), add a few clecos, and a few hours later you've got a rudder!
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| Here's a good view of the rudder stiffeners. |
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| Adding the right rudder skin. |
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| Final drilling the holes in the trailing edge. Instructions say to remove one cleco at a time, drill, replace cleco and move to the next one. The goal here is to keep the trailing edge as straight as possible and to prevent any waviness. More techniques for this riveting later. |
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| All clecoed up...and final hole drilling complete. Not sure if this is just an RV-14 thing or not, but the plan don't require the pre-punched holes in "the field" to be final drilled with a #40 bit. I saw an EAA vide about this and think this can be done when dimpeling for 3/32 rivets and when the skin is .032" or less. Works for me..probably just debur those pre-punched holes with scotch-brite pad before dimpling. A few hole in the upper ribs still did require final drilling. |
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| Looking at the top of the rudder here. |
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| Back of rudder with rudder horn on left. |
October 17, 2015
Spent a few hours today final drilling holes,de-burring and dimpling parts of the rudder. I'm beginning to see a pattern with this project. Cut-drill-deburr-dimple-repeat:) Not difficult to do, but is time consuming.
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| Here's the rudder parts de-burred and dimpled. |
October 18, 2015
Worked on the trailing edge piece for the rudder today. This piece fits between the skins of the trailing edge of the rudder. It give the skins added strength, but also helps to keep the trailing edge nice and straight during riveting. This piece is a wedge shape and the holes must be drilled #40 perpendicular to the chord line of the wedge and the holes countersunk perpendicular to the wedge face. Sounds complicated, but Van's gives a simple procedure to accomplish the in the plans manual. (See update below for new method I used to countersink the trailing edge)
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| Her's what the trailing edge piece looks like |
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| Here's the method Van's recommends to countersink the trailing edge of the rudder. |
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| Here's the set-up we came up with. |
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| This picture shows the trailing edge piece in the "jig" being countersunk. |
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| Scott operates the drill press while I keep the metal shavings clear with the air hose. |
December 2016 (Update)
As mentioned above, I rebuilt a second rudder. When countersinking the trailing edge piece for the new rudder I used a part from Cleveland Tool called the " RV Trailing Edge Drill Jig" part DJ25. This made countersinking the trailing edge much easier than the contraption I came up with for the first rudder. This part will also be used when working on the wing kit.
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| Here's the Drill Jig I got from Cleveland Tool and used on my second rudder trailing edge. |
October 20, 2014
Today, we dimpled the skins for the rudder.
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| We used the DRDT-2 to dimple the rudder skins. Scott did the left skin and I did the right. |
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| The holes in the rudder skins are the ones that did not require final drill per the plans. You just use the factory punched holes and go straight to dimpling. I initially did not debur these holes. However, I did notice that one side of the factory punched holes has a slight lip on them. The other side is smooth. One skin had the "lip on the exterior side of the skin and the other was on the inside. I ended up doing a very slight debut to the side that had the "lip". Dimples turned out great with the rivet fitting very nicely. |
October 21, 2015
Did some priming today.
Here's the rudder parts all primed and ready to assemble. The priming process is a kind of a pain, but I do like the the pretty green color afterwards.
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| Update: When I built the second rudder, I did not prime the trailing edge of the rudder skin where the trailing edge wedge will be secured with double sided tape. I wanted to make sure I could properly scuff the skin to give the tape a good "bite" and adhere properly. |
October 23, 2015
Started riveting rudder parts together today.
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| Rudder spar with bottom rib attached |
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| Bottom rib with horn brace in place. (Update: In this picture, you see that I used solid rivets to attach the two pieces of the bottom rib. When I built my second rudder, I followed the plans and used blind rivets.) |
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| Top of the spar. This rib is on the forward pard of the spar and will hold the rudder counterweight. |
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Here is one of three nutplates on the forward rudder spar. The threaded rod end bearings will thread into these to attach the rudder to the brackets on the vertical stabilizer.
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Today I also back-riveted the rudder stiffeners to the rudder skins.
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| Stiffeners in place before riveting |
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| You can see the rivets in in place |
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| Stiffener in place ready for riveting. |
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| This is the outer rudder skins. The rivets are held in place with rivet tape so the stay in place when the skins are turned over for riveting. |
October 24, 2015
Today Mark and Scott helped with the final rudder assembly. It is a big help to have an extra pair of hands for this. As the pictures below show, one person holds the skins up and out of the way while the other person does the riveting.
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| You can see here how the stiffeners come together to form the "ribs" for the rudder. Due to the tight location in this area, mostly blind (pop) rivets are used. You start at the bottom and work your way up until the skins are joined. |
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| Once the skins are joined, the forward spar is put in place and attache again using mostly blind rivets. Here's Mark looking like a surgeon calling for "cleco pliers". |
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| Scott using the Mark's pneumatic blind rivet puller. Much nicer than using the hand puller. |
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| This is the rudder counterweight located in the top portion of the rudder. It is attached to the rib using two bolts and locking nuts. There is another rib that will be placed above this weight, so it will be inaccessible once that is done. I put some proseal on the nut side of these bolts. This was nit called for in the plans, but I had seen a few other builders do this and it didn't seem like a bad idea to me. Update: When I built a second rudder build, I did not use proseal on the bolts/nuts as shown in this picture. I left it out because I noticed that the top rib (the rib that gets riveted above the rib in the picture and closes off the access to the weight) has two small holes directly above, and inline with the bolts/ nuts. That would possibly allow (if the holes were enlarged slightly), to possibly get a socket on the nuts if it ever became necessary to "re-tighten" those nuts. With the proseal, you would be unable to get the socket on the nut.) The bolts should never require "re-tightening", but I have heard of a few situations where it has happened. |
Update: The picture below shows how I used proseal on second rudder.
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| This is how I used proseal during the second rudder build. As I discussed above, I decided not to add proseal to the bolt / nut because I felt it may hold them in position even if they become loose or even break. With no proseal, I may be able to notice during pre-flights if the screw head appears loose, or worse broke and hanging down or missing. Here, I just added a little proseal around the perimeter of the weight to add a little extra security and stability. This procedure is not given in the plans, and probably provide no additional benefits. However, I didn't see a down side and decided to do it. |
Additionally, for the second rudder:
Another thing that I did different on the second rudder was to not rivet the lower rib together (using the 11 blind rivets) until I had those aft 9 (not 8 as stated in the plans) rivets set. This way, I was able to lift the skins easily and squeeze those rivets. The first rudder, as seen on my blog, I actually used solid rivets on that lower rib and was not able to "separate" the ribs to get to those aft rivets. Think I set with a very thin piece of metal. I followed plans on the second rudder and it worked out much better.
October 25, 2015
Riveting the trailing edge of the rudder is done a little differently than other riveting. Because both sides of the rivets need to be flush, both sides of the skins are dimpled. That's fine for the "factory" flush head of the rivet, but the "shop" head must also be driven flush. Van's gives a good explanation of how to accomplish this in the plans. Also, it is important to try and keep the trailing edge as straight as possible during this step. Again, Van's gives a procedure for this, although I have seen various methods used by builders.
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| The method I used to rivet the trailing edge of the rudder. We placed the trailing edge on a piece of flat steel that was attached to a strip of mdf. The edge was then clecoed to the steel to maintain the straight edge during the back-riveting process. |
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| Here's some of the rivets in place. |
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| Once the rivets are "set", they need to be driven a little more in order to get them flush with the skin. This is different than most rivet "shop" heads and only used in a a few locations during the build. Mostly trailing edges of control surfaces I think. To get the final flushness of the rivets, we used a back-riveting plate instead of the strip of steel. The back-riveting plate is more dense and seemed to enable us to get a nice flush finish on the shop head of the rivet. |
October 26, 2015
Finished up the rudder today. All that was left was to roll the leading edges. Not as easy as it sounds..at least not for me. Thought I had it done, but discovered a few blind rivets that I wasn't happy with. The skins did not "nest" together as tight as they should and the blind rivets were not able to secure a tight fit. This is partly due to the process of bending the skins to match the templates in the plans. The edges of the skins get "curled" making it difficult to match the skins together tightly. I ended up coming up with an idea (see below) that worked out pretty well, and I'm happy with the final product.
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| Here's the supplies I used to roll the rudder leading edge. Never used gorilla tape before, but it is good stuff. When I did the rolling, I started with the 1 1/4" pvc, then the 1" and finished up with the 3/4". The top part was pretty easy. The lower sections require a little more work. |
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| Here's the initial bend on the lower section. |
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| The pipe in position ready to be taped to the skin. |
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| Pipe taped to skins and rolled using channel lock pliers. You really have to over bend the skins because of the springback to get them to match the templates include in the plans. |
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| The skins are close here. I worked on them a bit more before I riveted. You can see how the edges of the skins get "curled" in a bit during the rolling process. Not really a problem for the skin on the top, but this causes the skin underneath to not fit tight against the top skin. I didn't really catch this until after I riveted and found I didn't have as tight a fit as I would like. I ended up drilling out the blind rivets for this entire lower section. I worked with these bends a bit more, but still couldn't seem to them them to fit tightly. I ended up coming up with a way to hold the skins tight while riveting. |
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| Here's the method I used to hold the skins together tightly while I riveted. I drilled holes in the pvc pipe to match the rivet holes. I drilled the holes larger than the diameter of the "set" rivets so the rivets would not grab the pipe. |
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I lined up the holes in the pipe with the cleco/rivet holes. I held/ pulled the inside skin outwards while my wife set the blind rivets with the pneumatic rivet puller. Turned out very well.
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