Matt's RV-7 Project

I didn't work much on the plane today, but I did get the rudder hung on the vertical stabilizer. It swings without any binding at all, which I suppose means that everything is straight. I'm not completely sure that I have the two hinge lines parallel, so I will probably remove and tweak it a few times before I torque the jam nuts.

Holy cow, the tail is getting huge!

Since the rudder stops aren't in place yet, I jammed a couple pieces of foam rubber beteween the rudder and the vertical stabilizer spar, to keep the rudder from swinging too far and getting banged up.

I took my replacement rudder over to John's place in order to make use of the five foot long back rivet plate he made. It made riveting the trailing edge pretty easy. First I set the rivets partway with the back rivet set, then flipped the rudder over and finished them off using the mushroom set.

Here's another one of those photos that shows I really built the airplane. Also that I shill for the Boulevard corporation on laundry day.

I alternated the rivet directions because I'm anal like that.

Then while we had everything set up, Chad and John finished off the trailing edge of John's rudder:

Two rudders completed!

After I brought the rudder home, I set about rolling the leading edge:

Done! I'm happy with the rudder now. Whew. The very long back rivet plate is an excellent way to do it, at a total cost of about $24 worth of steel angle and machine shop work.

This morning I fitted the required hinges to the new seats:

Really astute observers may notice that the hinge arrangement with the Classic Aero Aviator seats is different from the stock Van's seat backs. These seats are actually interchangeable between left and right, where the stock seats will only fit onto the floor hinges one way. Don't worry, I measured multiple times and this really is how it's supposed to go in order to center the seats on the control sticks.

Then I drove out to the other side of the KC metro to go to the Grain Valley (3GV) fly-in. Here's a photo of RV-9A builders John and Martha checking out a possible paint job:

I cam home tonight and was surprised to find this big box from Classic Aero waiting for me on the porch. I opened it up to find…

Seats! They look really great. The quality appears to be outstanding.

I sprung for the fancy Aviator seats, which have adjustible lumbar supports. Gotta be comfortable when flying. These are the adjusty-knobs on the back.

Each seat has two booster cushions. We'll see, eventually, how well Mary is able to see over the nose. It may turn out that we need to add some extra cushion stuff for her to see out. Luckily Classic Aero said they'd be happy to make up some extra booster cushions if we need them.

And I even like how the colors turned out. I can't wait to sit in the fuselage and make airplane noises.

I got the seats a little earlier in the building process than most other folks seem to do, but I wanted to have them in place for fitting the rudder pedals and other stuff like that, so the airplane will be exactly set up for how I'll want it when I'm flying it.