Rudder brace, spacers, and fuselage gussets^4h

Today I made a couple of parts for the fuselage.

The first part to make was the F-6118 rudder brace. It attaches to the firewall angle F-601N stiffener and provides bolting holes for the bearing block to attach to.

Since I am using custom rudder pedals, I needed to make sure that the brace is parallel to the side stiffeners to which the rudder bearing blocks attach. I think it's less of an issue with the stock pedals since they use two tubes and therefore the center block position is fixed. However, in my case, the block can be rotated on the tube, so I had to check a few positions of the pedals.

Then I clamped the brace to the firewall stiffener and drilled the holes with my angle drill.

To make sure that all 6 bolt holes are in line and are spaced exactly 1" apart, I made a drill jig from a scrap angle (I drilled 6 holes 1" apart in my mill).

Then I opened the holes for the AN3 bolts and trimmed the brace for the firewall recess.

I am placing the brace on the inboard side of the firewall stiffener since there is a bracket on the rudder tube that does not allow the bearing block to move outward. Strictly speaking, this moves the brace away from the center of an angle and creates a moment against the center of the rivets.

I don't know if I want to add lightening holes or not.

The rudder pedals installed:

The next little task I did was to drill the fuselage for the static ports. I used static ports from SteinAir.

Then I made the F-710C and F-711E spacers for the aft deck.

Trimmed the F-757-S gussets.

After that -- drilled the F-7114 fuselage gussets. I only drilled them to #40. I haven't found a way to upsize the holes without drill bits grabbing, so I'll wait. I also want to get a piloted reamer for the AN3 bolts.

To make the gussets fit, I had to slightly file the holes where wing bolts go through the gussets. Just a couple of strokes with the round file (otherwise, the wing bolts were catching on the side of the hole).