Aaaaannndddd we’re back. After a long hiatus of getting used to having no free time, I finally got back into the shop to build the plane. My birthday was on Wednesday and my lovely wife gave me the best gift ever… the gift of time! She took Jayson Jr. for 5 straight days and said, “Go do whatever you want, rediscover your hobbies.” And rediscover them I did.
It took me about a full day to get back up to speed on where I left off on the rudder. Since I last wrote, I decided to replace the left rudder skin that I messed up using the edge forming tool, so I had a pristine skin and a few stiffeners sitting in the garage. I had to essentially repeat all of the rudder construction steps again with the exception of the forward spar. There was some good news through, I had help 🙂
First, Van’s provided some help by a change in the kits in general, which applied to the new parts I got – the skins and stiffeners were all drilled to final size. Far less, “Put it together, take it apart” was required. I’m excited to see how much time this saves with future kits, but that’s still a bit in the future. COVID has really done a number on Van’s shipping times and we’re talking months to get a kit ready. There’s also the whole I gotta finish the tail kit first thing going on.
The second bit of help I got was from my flight instructor Kurt. He was interested to come see the build first hand and get a bit of time doing work on an airframe, so this provided a perfect opportunity. So he came out Thursday and provided some free labor 😂. We got quite a bit done, completing preparation and dimpling of the new skin, forming the trailing edge, and cutting and countersinking the trailing edge wedge. After Kurt left, I did a dry fit of all the parts and took a few pictures before pulling it all apart for priming.
I have video for the day that I’ll get uploaded at some point, but it’s pretty time consuming to put them together so it may be a little bit before I get around to it. As always, if you have questions or just want to learn more from my mistakes just reach out.