Rudder

Tonight my goal was to install the rudder. First, I connected both elevator surfaces together. It was much easier to do this without the rudder surface in the way. I connected the aft elevator pushrod at the same time.

The bottom bolt was not reacheable with my torque wrench so I counted the number of turns on the bolt above when properly torqued, then applied the same number of turns on the bottom one.

Once the three bolts torqued properly and sealed, I went up in a ladder to reach the rudder surface on a shelf. Removed dust and patched a few scratches with small doilies cut out of polyurethane tape. In a similar way than for the elevator gap seals, I lubricated the rudder seals and glued the one above the top hinge to the fin. Next step was to install the rudder surface by bolting the two hinges on the fin using new hardware. While torquing, It was a little tricky to make sure the tail wire attachment horns were on the proper orientation. Here's the result with the tail wires fitted, but not torqued:

Next step will be the tail rigging!