Lots of progress on rudder but definitely out of practice! 264 hours on the hobbs.

I am kind of tired right now so will post a ton of pics tomorrow. I made a ton of progress this weekend on the rudder, but of course not as much as I had originally hoped for, as is always the case. In a nutshell, this is what I got done:

- Finished priming the rudder skin areas and all the rudder frame parts.
- Dimpled all remaining holes using the hand squeezer. I did NOT uze the pneumatic squeezer for this for several reasons, the most important of which is the fact that this is probably the thinnest skin of the entire airplane at .020 inches, and I did not want to risk screwing it up with the air squeezer. I have much better control with the hand squeezer and it worked very well of setting these dimples.
- Met with my friend and fellow builder Mike Rettig and his wife Aneta on Saturday at my location. They are edging ever closer to actually starting on their RV 10 Empennage kit. He helped me us the close quarter tool to finish several dimples in the rudder skin that I could not reach with the hand squeezer.
- Countersunk the underside of the lead counterweght with a number 10 countersink bit, so that it will sit flush to the web of the R703 tip rib after it is bolted down. I also had to partially drill out the sides of the counterweight in two places to allow clearance from the shop heads of the to most forward rivets along each side of the R703 tip rib that attach the R713 counterbalance skin. I used a number 12 drill bit to create a hole (a shaft actually) with a large enough radius to allow clearance from the shop head of the AN426-3 rivets. That did the trick. ALl other shop heads of other rivets appear to clear the lead counterweight with no problem.
-Spent several HOURS locating adn reviewing a series of posts on VAF that discuss drag or friction torque, and the importance of adding that to the torque values given in a special table provided by the AC 43.13 bible of aircraft building and repair practices. What a pain.
-Test fir the lead counter balance block to the R703 tip rib, and torqued the screw down to initial specs (25 inch pounds) to verify that the countersunk holes were drilled out correctly.
- Riveted the counterbalance skin to the R703 tip rib. I even had to drill out 2 rivets that I had told my self I would NOT install per the plans before I got started, but I ended up setting them by mistake anyway - what a pain!
- Today I managed to get most of the frame riveted. I took some advise from another builder friend of mine, Steve Riffe,  that I was able to utilize to my benefit (Thanks Steve!). He had learned the hard way that the -5 rivets that attach the support plates to the main rudder spar for the rod end bearings are a bit too long, and he tried to use the pneumatic squeezer on those with less than desireable results. The rivets kept bending over. He had to drill them out and ended up bucking them with the rivet gun. I used the rivet gun from the get go, but unfortunately I did not quite get off scott free either. I buggered up one -7 rivet, and my special AN470 drill out tool failed miserably to find the center of the rivet head when I attemtped to drill it out. Although the support plate was partially incorrectly drilled out as a result of this, I managed to salvage it, and was able to finally get the rivet shank out and reset it with a longer -8 rivet to fill the slightly larger hole that resulted from the rivet removal.

Next steps
- I need to replace the two rivets that attach the nut plate to the top support plate R608, finish riveting the tip rib assembly to the spar, and finish riveting the R710 support bracket to the bottom forward part of the rudder, and then I can finally start zipping up the skin onto the frame. Then comes rolling the leading edges, installing the rod end bearings, and finally attaching the rudder to the VS to verify that it actually moves like a rudder. Seems like it just never ends.....

All in two days work! A ton of pics will follow tomorrow!