Tail Details (4)

4 hours

Wrapping up a bunch of little items in the tail area.  I cleaned up the clearances I filed on the rudder stops, and also replaced a few rivets on the stop plates with flush rivets to avoid any contact with the rudder.  Then I installed the rudder and safety-wired the hinge pin in place.

Next I filed some extra clearance into the hole on the right side that the rudder cable passes through.  The left side was ok, but I had to enlarge the right side quite a bit to avoid having the cable contact the skin.

According to the plans, you insert the ruddervator hinge pins in from the top.  But, if you do that, then once the stabilator tips are riveted on then you can't remove the ruddervators without drilling out all those rivets.  I know I'm going to eventually want to remove the ruddervators so I can paint everything, so I wanted to avoid that.

There's nothing blocking the hinge pins from going in from the bottom, so I tried installing them that way and didn't have any trouble.  The only concern then would be securing the pins so they couldn't ever fall out.  I talked to Sonex, and they said if I can secure the pins without interfering with any control surfaces then that should be fine.

So my solution to this was to replace the top two bolts on the tail post with drilled head bolts, and safety-wire the end of each pin to a bolt.  Now the ruddervators are removable without touching the stabilator tips, and the pins aren't going to go anywhere.

With that settled I went ahead and riveted the tips on.

Finally, I installed all the final ruddervator pushrod and rudder cable hardware, and then started working on the little fairings that cover the cables and pushrods.

The fairings are plastic and come in kind of a rough form.  A few minutes on the bandsaw and sander and they were ready to go.

I laid out a few holes on each one, then drilled them to the side skins.  I just used some leftover Avex aluminum rivets I had from the wing tips to attach them.  Of course I ended up being short exactly one rivet, so I'll come back to that last one later!