Well, after much hand-wrenching and a few sleepless nights, I’ve decided to dive into taking the rudder apart to assess the damage.
I’m guessing there are a few hundred rivets I need to drill out, which is going to ruin my drilling out average, but that’s okay. I want the rudder to be perfect. The pictures aren’t really that exciting, but here they are anyway.
About the first 25 after they've been drilled out.
I started drilling out the leading edge blind rivets. They ended up not being that bad, but not something I ever really want to do in the future.
Started drilling out leading edge rivets.
I ended up using a #40 drill bit for the blind rivets, even though they are really #30 sized holes. #40 allowed me to pry the heads off really easily. (You can see the heads of the blind rivets on the table.)
67 rivets drilled out, and I'm now dripping sweat on the rudder. Time to go inside.
But just for kicks, I took a picture of the rudder skin after pulling off one of the blue vinyl sections.
It's going to look really good when I take the vinyl off of the whole airplane. (You can see the outline, though, which means I'll still need to do a little polishing before first flight.)
It was about 30 minutes in the garage for just this part. I’m trying to figure out if I want to keep going on this or start in on the wing kit. For sure, I’ll need to finish the elevator trim tab before moving on to the wing. Maybe I’ll put the rudder away for awhile and move on.
Posted by Andrew 
Andrew's RV-7 Build Log 