Metal Prep on Rudder Pieces

Tammy and Acacia headed out to do some grocery shopping so I stayed at home and decided to work a little on the airplane tonight.  I only spent about 1.5 hours on it, but I ended up finishing all of the metal prep on the rudder parts.

I started out by deburring all of the holes in the remaining pieces.  I picked up a small little electric screwdriver which made the mundane process of deburring, really easy and quick.  I switched out the normal deburring cutter with the single fluted deburring tool when I worked on the thin skins.  I was also very careful on the .020″ skin to keep it from knife edging. I also removed some more strips of the protective plastic on the rudder skins, so that all of my holes are now clear of it.

Next up was to deburr the edges.  I fired up the scotchbrite wheel and ran all of the parts across it to smooth out their edges.  For the thicker rudder horn, I first worked it against the normal stone grinding wheel on the bench grinder, then smoothed it out on the scotchbrite wheel.   I then used my handheld deburring tool to smooth out the edges of some of the larger holes, and finished off the hard to reach edges with a scotchbrite pad.  I then rounded the corners of the skins, and hit their edges with the scotchbrite pad.

Not many photos since this is pretty simple work, but here is all the parts after they were done:

Hours Worked: 1.5
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