Earlier I had said I would rivet everything by hand but I quickly realized that would be painful and foolish when there’s an air gun sitting in the bench. So I hooked up the compressor and made fairly light work of getting the first set of rivets in.
A second pass and the first side was finished. Flip over and repeat.
The very last thing to do was to attach the rudder horn with some clecoes and rivet it in place, making sure the flanges were pointing up.
And with that the rudder is complete.
All in all about 4.2 hours of work compared to the 12 hours it took to build the 750 rudder. For sure the kit was a lot less work than the 750, much progress has been made in the kit design, but also when I build the 750 rudder I barely knew how to put up a shelf, let alone draw rivet lines, snip metal, cleco stuff together, deburr etc. But it does make me wonder “much less” there is to do on the modern 650 kit.
So with the rudder done, the question is are we going on to do the rest…. no decision made yet, but what’s the point of this blog if this is the end???