No building today…..but some very important research!

Carl Morgan kindly flew down from Whenuapai in his RV-7A (ZK-VII) and took me for a ride. Carl has built one heck of a nice plane and it was great to crawl all over it and check out some of his great ideas. He also has an excellent website documenting his build here.

Thanks again for the ride Carl!

When figuring out the best way to cut the rudder stiffeners I ended up bending one of them right at the end. Rather than try to straighten it, I decided to cut the end off and use that piece to make one of the shorter stiffeners. As it turned out, the stiffeners can only be shortened from one end due to the very slight difference in the pre-punched hole spacing. The spacing of the holes is not even along the length of the stiffener (though very close and looks even to the eye).

So what does all this mean. Well I have had to order a new stiffener from Vans so work on the rudder skins is on hold till it arrives. No problem, plenty more to do.

Also, I needed a few other bits from Vans including a replacement R-912 as mine has been manufactured wrong.

While waiting for the stiffener to arrive, I moved onto the rudder skeleton. Fabricated the R-917 shim and fitted the control horn to the spar and lower rib. Some rounding of the control horn with the scotchbrite wheel was required to get it to sit first against the lower rib flange.

Match drilled the rudder stiffeners to the left rudder skin. I drilled through into a board under so the cleco’s could hold the whole assemble to the bench as I went.

Marked the rudder stiffeners acording to the plans and then used the bandsaw and snips to cut them to size.

Finished all the edges with the scotchbrite wheel in the bench grinder.

I’m up to the point where I need to start cutting and trimming the rudder stiffeners and since this is just the first of many tasks where a bandsaw would be the best tool for the job, I went and bought one.

It’s not a super expensive one but it’s large enough for what i need and I also got a 14tpi 3mm blade for it which should cut aluminium like butter!

Finished attaching the HS skins so that’s it for that part of the airplane for now. Still need to attach the fiberglass tips but I’ll do that later with other fiberglass work.

Newer Posts »