Skinned the Rudder

Posted On January 14, 2019

After a long period of working on the fuel tank, I’m at a step where it needs to be attached to the wing. Unfortunately it’s ridiculously cold in NH right now, which makes working in the garage unpleasant. So, I decided to take a break from the wing and finish up some empennage tasks.

I had to request a new rudder skin from TAF a while ago, as the original one that came with my kit was damaged. The replacement skin arrived after I had already started working on the wing, so I didn’t get back to finishing the rudder until now.

It felt nice to quickly finish something in a day! The only thing that slowed me down was having to modify some rivets to shorten them to fit on the aft edge of the skin. Below is the (almost) complete rudder – the only thing left to do is attach the fiberglass cap, which I’m purposely waiting to do until I decide on which recognition strobe I’m going to use. I guess I also have the task of filling the rivet heads at some point.

Next up is the elevator, which also had a skin problem, but I have the replacements in-hand.