Jan 30 -- Glue Rudder Trailing Edge

Today was a short session on the plane per-se (the rest of the day included cleaning more junque out of the garage in preparation for the wings).

In a previous post I mentioned that fellow EAA chapter member Rob Kochman gave me a piece of angle iron from his RV-10 project. The angle iron was laid on top of the work table, over a piece of 3/4" plywood. The ply was about 4" wide x as long as the table, and served two purposes:

First, it raised the trailing edge of the rudder off the table a bit, because the rudder trailing edge holes are not perpendicular to whichever side happens to be laying against the table top.

Second, the ply is sacrificial wood when holes are drilled in the angle iron. All the pundits say that an advantage of the table top as spec'd in EAA Chapter 1000 drawings is that you can replace it when too many holes are drilled. But here we are not even half way thru the empennage and the table top already looks like some poor slob in New Jersey who owed the mob money.

Masking tape covered the angle iron, so that errant ProSeal wouldn't goober it up.

Next I drilled holed in the angle iron using every third hole in the rudder as a template. Was afraid that I'd mess up the other side of the rudder, which didn't turn out to be the case. Note to others: drill holes in every hole, and do it the first time that you drill the rudder rather than later, which avoids this concern.

Next I suited up an broke out Pro Seal to glue everything together. Used the smallest size that Van's sells, and still only used up 75% of the batch. You can see in the close-up photo below that a bit of ProSeal squeezed out. A couple of very small 3/4" blocks of wood inserted into the trailing edge kept it open to enable application of the ProSeal. Using a small mixing stick, I spread it between rivet holes -- which were bare aluminum. My theory is that primer will lift off the surface, making the entire exercise pointless. Will trim that once this stuff dries -- touching it only serves to spread goo on everything.

Once finished I had to drill mot of the holes that were skipped, in order to make everything cleco down perfectly flat. Used some decrepit clecos, because ProSeal might ruin them.

Everything needs to set up for a few days, so that's it for now on progress.

Total Time: 1.5 hours