No excuses left, time to get started on building.
Saturday 13
Built the balance that was described in April Sport flyer. This is a ratio balance, a very simple design it uses a single cup and does not weight the resin, just measures by ratio. I tested it out with 4 identical nuts (large). Put them into the cup, shifted the cup on the beam, added a fifth and voile, a perfect balance point.
Jenny and I cut the cloth for the rudder lay up. The manual asked for two pieces, 140 and 160 cm. The manual cautioned that only one piece matched each direct, but didn't offer a suggestion as to which piece belonged to which direction !! I drew on the foam core some 30 degree markers in each direction with a fine pen to aid the lay up alignment.
Wednesday 17
Shaped the radius on the top and bottom of the jig block. Really couldn’t make a lot of sense of the explanation in the manual. Called Europa but the tech support people were out. The folk at Europa were keen to help, the sales guy went out to the workshop and took a look at a finished rudder for me. Seems like a nice radius which tapered down to the tip was what I should be doing .
Thursday 18
Glued the rudder jig block to the bench, and the rudder to the block.
Saturday 20
Didn’t do any building, but I did take my Private Pilots exam today. Nice to get that out of the way.
Monday 22
Jenny and I did the lay up of the first rudder side. This took about three hours to complete including clean up. Followed Burt Rutan’s Moldless Composite Home built Sandwich Aircraft Construction book. Everything seemed pretty straightforward. Temperature for the lay up started at 22c. With the help of an overhead 500w lamp and a 1000w heater we got the temperature up to a nice 25c with the relative humidity settling out at 60%. The basement seems to be very stable for temperature, but we kept the heating lamp on all night. Kept an epoxy sample, labeled it #1.
Tuesday 23
Inspected the lay up, no dry areas, but the base area really needed more squeegeeing out.
Wednesday 24
Discovered that I forgot to apply peel ply on the rudder tip and root. Called Europa support, they advised that this was not an issue, simply scuff these areas to get a good bond on the next lay up.
I found that epoxy had run onto the foam on the tip & root area. This appears to be very difficult to smooth off. Plan for next lay up:
Saturday 27
Cleaned off the epoxy drips on my cutting / lay up table. Started sanding the radius on tip and root. Worked for about an hour, need to pay attention to drips and runs next time.
Sunday 28
Nice day, took Jenny flying. In the evening I completed sanding of the wide end radius. This is difficult to do with out damaging the radius.
Monday 29.
Sanded the leading edge and trailing edges down. Thought I’d be clever and use the electric plane for this operation. Went well until I slipped. Fortunately it only nicked a non structural area on the leading edge. This will not be too difficult to repair. Lesson learned, went back to using hand tools.
Tuesday 30.
Finished off sanding the trailing edge. A bit of filler will be needed to restore the nice radius to the top and bottom. Cleaned up the workshop, time to get a shed vacuum cleaner.