Due to various distractions, assembly of the Vertical Stabilizer has taken a number of days, whenever I could catch an hour here and there.
I decided a while back to include a conduit up to the top nose rib, as many have done before, and a fabricated a doubler plate to support the conduit end connection, with a couple of flush riveted plate nuts to provide possible support for any future fitting that I don’t know about yet, such as an antenna. I also added a plate nut to the rear spar, to provide a grounding point for a braid to the rudder, again because it is easy to do before assembly.
The riveting went OK. I drilled out and replaced a few, which turned out to be easy enough. There are a few rivets on one side of the lower front spar flange that I’m not happy with. I decided to leave the lower rib cleco’d for now so it can be removed, and wait for a TC to come over and review that area.
Once the blue stuff is removed and the exterior skins cleaned up, it is quite hard to take a reasonable picture of the outside because the Alclad is like a mirror, and reflections make the surface look horrible. In actuality, the surfaces are very clean.
