Empennage

Today I got back on track with the project. Last Friday I had surgery on my left eye to implant a crystalens accommodating lens and I've been taking it easy and recuperating. My vision still isn't very good yet, but the doctor dilated my eye to prevent movement so the tissue of the eye can attach to the lens he implanted. It's supposed to be that way until this coming Friday or maybe Saturday. I have a checkup on Friday and if everything looks good to the doc then I'll get the right eye done on Monday.

But enough of that. Today I was beginning to get a little stir crazy so my cure for that is to work in the garage 'airplane factory'. The next assembly in the empennage is the rudder so I found all the parts I needed for this part of the project and got started. There are two skins for the rudder, the left and right. Also there are the rudder stiffeners that come in 8 pieces. The job today was to trim individual stiffeners from strips consisting of two stiffeners. So you have to make two stiffeners from each of the eight strips supplied with the kit. Fortunately I've got some experience with this exercise as it is very similiar to the practice kit that Donna and I built at the Sheet Metal School with Geroge Orndorf. As I also had ordered one from Van's I did a second one when I got back from the school. There was a note in the plans to make sure that you fit the stiffeners to the inside of the skins. I reckon it must be pretty easy to get them backwards if you're not careful. So, that's how I spent the afternoon, trimming and fitting the stiffeners to the rudder skins.

5 Hours

Total hours on project = 76