Finishing Rivets and Preparing to Roll the Leading Edge of the Rudder Skins

Before you can start riveting the skin, you need to place a small dab of RTV sealant where the two stiffeners meet at the rear of the rudder. You know, that now impossible small space at the back of the rudder where you can't hardly do anything! Luckily, my wife works at hospital. After asking the right people, she was allowed to bring home several sizes of dosage seringes. These make the job of putting the sealant in the right place much much easier. You take the RTV from the tube, squeeze it into the seringe, and get it as close to the stiffener joint as possible, and squeeze away. You are trying to coat the very ends of each stiffener, as well as the last rivet that is set on each one, to prevent cracks from forming in the skin in this area due to vibration.

The RTV and seringe that I used:

And here is the RTV after using the seringe to put the RTV on the stiffeners:

Here is the flat sets that I used in the squeezer to set the flush rivets on the skin

I ground down the edges on the flange yoke similar to the way I did this for the other yoke. I also did it for the no hole thin nose yoke. Finally I have a set of yokes that should no longer mar up the surface of anything.

And now to set the remaining rivets on the R710 support bracket on the bottom of the rudder. Again, most folks use the pop rivets here, but IO felt up to the challenge to try to figure out a way to set these holes with the usual hard AN426 flush rivets used to attach the skin to the frame.

Step 1: Re-mount the rudder against the bench with the bottom side up so that I could access the holes in the bracket. This was quite the imaginative process, trying to figure how to secure everything correctly, without damaging the rudder. Solution was to basically take a long piece of particle board that has been my trusty drill board up to this point, set it along side the work bench, and proceed with clamping the rudder skin to it as shown in the photos:

And now we can start riveting the remaining 6 rivets on the sides of the support bracket. What I did was:
1. Used the fat man bucking bar which is short enough to fit inside the access hole of the bracket, setting it on a piece of the underlayment foam that I recently used to install my hard wod floors in the house, and slid it up into position for the forward-most rivets on both sides. I held it in place against the rivet with one hand, while holding the rivet gun with the other, adn I was able to successfully set the two forward rivets. Then I was able to use the hand squeezer with the flange yoke to set the remaining 4 rivets.

When I finished, all of the rivets on the side of the bracket were nicely set with normal hard rivets. Again, having the correct yoke and rivet sets, and a bucking bar of the correct size, allowed me to accomplish this with relatively little fuss.