Stephen Larew

personal website — updated sporadically

Surprise Rudder Parts

I star­ted the rud­der to­night. I have yet to look over all the parts in­cluded in the com­plete air­frame kit, but already I found sur­prises.

Preview of the layout of rudder skeleton pieces.

First, an ob­ser­va­tion: Zenith Air­craft did not choose low-residue easy-peel stick­ers when la­beling every single part. In fact, I spent at least an hour peel­ing off and clean­ing up the stick­ers on all the rud­der pieces.

Two not so sur­pris­ing dis­cov­er­ies:

  1. Most of the tail pieces were packed at the bot­tom of the big box of alu­min­um parts. Why were these pieces not packed in the ob­vi­ous loc­a­tion at the top of the box? I spent a good hour un­pack­ing body annd oth­er parts be­fore find­ing the tail pieces at the bot­tom. Sigh.
  2. Where is the com­pos­ite rud­der tip 65-T-4-2? In fact, where are all of the com­pos­ite pieces?

The big sur­prise is the ad­di­tion of two ex­tra pieces (65-T-4-10 “rud­der tip re­in­force­ment” and 65-T-4-11) that are ab­sent from the draw­ings. Based on their di­men­sions and the one la­bel I saved, it ap­pears they will fit at the top of the rud­der and serve to re­in­force the rud­der tip.

It turns out the draw­ings were not up­dated but the latest ver­sion of the 65-T-5 Rud­der Skins 1.03 10/9/14 manu­al (found via Google search) shows how the ex­tra parts are as­sembled in­to the tip of the rud­der.