Day 1: Rudder: Inventory and First Steps (1h 30m)

The crate arrived on Monday but I did not catch up with it until Friday. It was waiting for me by the front door.

First task of the day was finally build our bench. Rather than build a bench completely from scratch we had purchased the 2x4basics 90164 Workbench and Shelving Storage System from Amazon which looked like it be an easy job, and give us something that works. Turned out to live up to it’s promise, I think we made a very good looking bench! Once the bench was complete, we laid out all the parts on it and took inventory. In this picture the rivets and clecos are behind the skin so you can’t see them.

After inventory I took one of the files and deburred all the edges so that there was nothing sharp to cut myself on, there were definitely some places on the skins to get a decent cut. The very first thing to do is to cut the spar doublers to size by lining them up with the spar edge and marking off a corner to remove. I used the snips to remove the corner and then filed smooth.

I then clamped the doublers in place with the spar and drilled the holes that will secure the doubler inside, cleco’ing them together as I went.

You can’t see the doublers in this picture because they are on the other side of the spar.

The very first day seemed to go pretty well, and I am 90 minutes into construction.