Rudders away!

I decided a few weeks back to start building an ultralight closely modeled after the Goat 4 by Mike Sandlin. His Basic Ultralight Glider series are meant to be home-built using hand-tools such as a drill and hacksaw. He also publishes well-drawn plans online, which is a major part of the draw to this project. Also, Sandlin actually has flown several permutations of this series, leading me to put more faith in the design.

I started the rudder and the horizontal stab recently. The first couple pieces are these offset angles that hold the rudder control horn onto the rudder leading edge tube. The first one took about an hour (eek!), but the next two only took about half an hour apiece. This is definitely going to take a while.

I haven't worked with aluminum much before, so these parts are my experiment. I cut them out of 6061-T6 aluminum (per plans) with a hacksaw and then filed the rounds. I also center-punched the hole locations and later took these to a drill press to make nice straight holes.


Next came the frame of the rudder. It is essentially two tubes, a leading edge and a curved trailing edge. The leading edge actually has two inner stiffener tubes inside that reinforce the bolted areas. The trailing edge tube gets riveted into slots in the leading edge tube.

I must admit that the trailing edge tube I bent over my knee and had no intention to make it precise. It does look roughly like it should, hehe.





Just yesterday I finished the rudder control horn assembly by adding the control horn and another hole through the leading edge tube. This assembly does seem very rigid and I can see putting some torque on the rudder.

I still don't have a good idea how to drill several holes in line or in perpendicular on a tube. Any references here would be most appreciated. It seems straight forward to drill straight through with a drill press and a v-block, but how do you get a hole perpendicular to the first one?



That's all for now. Next come the ribs of the rudder made of foam, carbon rod, and a wrap of fiberglass. I have already cut the blue foam rib blanks, but not yet fit them into the rudder itself. I still need to order $60 of carbon rod.