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Steve helped me form the leading edge on the rudder. The process was not as bad as I had feared from reading other web sites. It is tough to form the curve just right.
We followed the instructions and bent the edge around to about 90 degrees with a 1/2″ (outside diameter 7/8″) galvanized pipe I had laying around. We worked on one section at a time. On the wider part near the bottom, we also moved the pipe back from the edge a bit and formed the metal around the pipe to encourage it into a nice round form. In the end, we still had to do some serious squeezing to line up the holes for clecos and drilling.
I must say the leading edge came out looking sweet. Here’s a shot looking down the length of the rudder.
We also tried to buck some of the rivets in the tight spots of the rudder and elevator with a cold chisel. I’ve read that other people have made that work. It didn’t work for us. I put in MK-319-BS blind rivets instead. In every case these rivets are on a bottom surface or will be covered up by the fiberglass used to fair in the tips. If I had noticed that before, I wouldn’t have even tried to buck them.