I found some spare time this week. If work was a hurricane, the brief calm would equate to the eye of the storm. So I used the time to sneak into the garage and start the rudder. It has been nearly two weeks since I started the Tiger 2 and I haven’t made nearly as much progress as I wanted. Of course I did hit a bog with the elevator and started to obsess over the piece. In the end I decided to put it aside and move on.
I must admit I was a little concerned about assembling the rudder. Mainly because it 
looked fragile. Small 1/2” X 1/4” coupled with some smaller 1/4” X 1/8” spars. Assembly actually went rather quickly. I was able to cut the pieces and pin them up in a reasonable fashion. However I did run into a minor snag. The top brace of the Rudder itself was not of the proper angle. So if you pinned the parts according to the plans, there was a small gap. A little shaping with the sanding bar and it corrected 90% of the gap. I didn’t sweat the the rest. I glued the frame and started cutting and gluing the internal spars. Gluing the outside frame first seemed to be a good strategy. Unlike the Horizontal Stab, I pined every blessed piece. It was a little unwieldy.
This time my sanding tools were assembled and cured. So rounding the edges of the fin and the rudder went quick. Additionally, the beveling operation of the Rudder on the hinge side went smoothly. All in all it was a great evening of building. Took about 2 hours, but with some music in the background I forgot about the entire day and completely unwound.
Next up ………….
