Today I did a lot of finishing work on the rudder skeleton parts. I did all the countersinking, dimpling, and deburring on those internal pieces. Here is the double countersunk rudder trailing edge.
Here is the counterweight rib and counterweight all drilled and countersunk.
Also today was my first attempt at doing the metal prep work for priming. I spent a couple hours this evening cleaning, alumipreping, and alodining all of the vertical stablilzer and rudder parts. The problem is that I tried using the 'brush on' method of alodining and there was a blue tint to many (most) of the parts. I couldn't figure out why this was occurring, but I did find two references on the web that talked about blue tint from alodine. The only common thread is that one was talking about the blue tint appearing near where the parts were touching a plastic bucket, and the other was complaining about the same problem I had (brushing it on and seeing blue tint appear). I have a sneaky suspicion that this has something to do with the material that the foam brush was made of. It think it reacted with the acid in the alodine and that is where the blue tint came from. I'm kinda upset about this because I think it would be in my best interest to re-do the whole mess.. What a pain! That was 2-3 hours of hard work wasted. I'm going to have to rethink this alodine application. I should probably get a couple long, narrow plastic tubs to do this in and go for the proper 'soak' method vs. this 'brush on' method. Everyone seems to get better results (deeper, more even coloring) with this method...
