Rudder assembly
The replacement screws and nuts for the rudder counterweight showed up. I ordered them Saturday and they showed up Wednesday via FedEx Ground. Not bad. Van’s only charged a few bucks handling and a few bucks freight. I probably could have found them locally, but didn’t want to waste the time running around.
After staring at a few of the rivets on the rudder reinforcement plates a while longer, I decided I still didn’t like the lookes of them even after redoing them once already. I took some advice from the Yahoo RV7 list and bumped up the pressure to 100 psi. The gauge that came with the tank definitely needs to be replaced. It varies +/- 5 psi for no reason. The higher pressure along with concentrating on lining up the squeezer better produced very good results. I’m happy with all of the rivets on the reinforcement plates now.
I attached the rudder counterweight with the new hardware and then clecoed the rudder skins onto the spar. The instructions are pretty good about spelling out the steps. There are 9 rivets in the skin per side that must be set before putting on the top rib. Did that, but didn’t get any further. Somebody had a piano recital tonight (and she did great).
This shot shows that I had to make the slot in the skin a little bit larger in order to provide some space around the rudder horn.
