Oshkosh Airventure 2011 Interrupts the build!

At about 302 hours I had rolled the leading edge rudder skins and did my best to finish closing the skins and pop riveting them together. It became clear that my initial rudder bend had actually worked so well that I ended up over-bending the skins. This created some problems when I tried to insert pop rivets in the last couple of holes in the bottom section. The inside skin would cleco OK to the outerskin, since the shaft of the cleco is long enough to reach inside, but as soon as I let loose of the cleco to try to insert the pop rivets. the inside skin would tuck away from the outer skin to the point that the pop rivet would not be long enough to grab hold of the hole in the inner skin, no matter how hard I tried to push in on the outer skin to close up the gap.

At this point I had about 1.5 weeks remaining till Oshkosh, and it felt like I was in hell week trying out for the Navy Seals just so I could finally get head up to Airventure 2011. The trailer was in the shop for some needed brake repairs which I had to force them to make twice before the problem was finally resolved. I learned after I got back that the tech that supposedly worked on them the first time was fired after failing to properly fix my problem. Apparently he had done the same thing to two other customers before me, so the shop manager cut him loose. I have read some stories about aircraft mechanics doing essentially the same thing while working on some airplanes. Just one more reason why I only trust myself to work on MY airplane when the time comes.

Work was also making me insane, since I was finishing up a project that I had worked on for the last 10 months. I was also in the middle of refinancing my house after seeing that interest rates had finally fallen lower than my current rate, so I was going through all that crap as well. When I hit the problem with closing up the rolled leading edges of the rudder, I had had enough for a while. The "so-close-but-yet-so-far routine with the rudder, combined with all the other madness that was happening around me, was really wearing me down. So I suspended the build to give me enough time to deal with everything else and placed also focus on preparing for Oshkosh.

This trip to Airventure 2011 was special for me. My youngest son Adam decided to tag along. I sort of half bribed him to come along by offering to charter a fishing boat to do some fishing on Lake Michgan, since we would be "in the neighborhood." In the end he had a great time, and even voluntarily mentioned to me that he could not wait to go back next year. That was music to my ears, and it was the reaction that had hoped he would have.


Some pics of where I left off on the rudder
All covered up to prime the leading edge of the inside skin:

Top and middle sections rolled, bent into final pistion by hand, and clecoed into place. Right side of the lower half still needs to be rolled. Many others before me had siad to do this in sections and don't try to roll all three sections at the same time. Exactly what I did.

Close up showing that the skins seem to be  butted up against each other nicely. What you don't see is the extreme curvature of the inside skin. So at least the kerf seemed to do its job by allowing the skins to lay flat against each other.

This last shot starts to show how "over" bent the inside skin became after I coaxed the skin into the final position. so that the holes of both skins would line up more or less in along the center line of the spar. If you look back at some of the early photos takne right after I performed the bend with tube, you will notice that the flanges and holes are almost 90 degrees perpendicular to the rest of the rudder skin. IN this pic, you now see just how much further I had to bend the skins over just so that the holes of both skins would overlap so that you can apply the pop rivets to close them up. Not real happy at all with the turn out of this. In fact, this is where I stopped taking pictures. You can just see the curl of the edge of the skin, and how it is obviosly now more than 90 degrees opposed to the spar, or starting to tuck further inward. This is the problem I spoke of earlier. The combination of hand forcing the skin into position the rest of the way and the over bent edges that resulted, is what caused the difficulties with the pop rivets. I will take more pics showing the crappy but still acceptable result of attaching the leading edges with the pop rivets, adn then you will understand even better what I am talking about. I will do pics of Oshkosh next cuz rehashing this process is painful, and I need some "happy" photos to take my mind off of the crappy result I got.