More rudder work

Short day in the shop-didn’t have a lot of free time tonight.  Match-drilled the stiffeners to the skins, then removed them and deburred all the holes.

There was also some more fun.  As I was trimming the stiffeners last night, I kept thinking it was really odd that the topmost stiffeners were sort of “backwards” from all the others.  Earlier today, I briefly walked out to the garage to check things out, and noticed that those same stiffeners looked to have too much material on the leading edge end.  I set the spar in place, and yep…they were going to need more trimming.  I thought it was especially odd that they didn’t fit quite right in addition to being different from all the others.

It was about four hours later that I had a sudden epiphany.  Another trip to the garage confirmed it-I had tapered the wrong end of those two stiffeners.  Argh.  Luckily, it appears that I’ll still be able to use them; in fact, I went ahead and trimmed them some more this evening so they’ll fit.  I’m a bit concerned about the amount of material on the tapered end of these two stiffeners, so I’ve submitted the question to the bright folks over at the VAF forums.  I might call the folks at Van’s as well to see if this is an issue.  Stiffener material is pretty cheap, but it would be kind of annoying since I just ordered some parts from them.

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