The odyssey begins - our day at the Rudder Workshop

Completed:  Rudder!
Time Spent: 5 hours (6 with lunch)

Yesterday, my youngest son Shawn and I attended a 1:1 Rudder Workshop at Zenair (the Canadian company owned by Chris's older son Michael) in Midland (about 40 miles from here).  We started at 7:30 am and were met by Michael who gave us a tour of their impressive facilities.  They were also busy building a new building to run further factory workshops and help builders complete their airplanes.  We may well take advantage of that when it comes time to mount the engine, etc.

In addition to making the 4 seat versions of the Zenith aircraft (the 640 and 801 types), they do all the wing spars, the aluminum and inflatable floats and the quick build kits for the other models.  In fact they had two quick build 650's being built for their US customers so we got to see some of the more complicated bits well in progress.  Other than the tricky looking canopy work, it looks like more of the same.

The firewall of the 650B...  it is the same part as the 701/750 series.  That front bracket will hold the nose gear.

They spend the morning cutting and fitting the canopy.  It was good to watch that.  Nice big cockpit with LOTS of visibility.

A shot of how the canopy attaches to (one of the) roll bar(s).

The seat pans and centre console.  Note how they seats are reclined like an F-16! :-)

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Centre spar and firewall.

Looking at the rear of the seat pan and then the centre wing spar.  Those panels with writing on them slid into the wing spar are for alignment purposes.  That's how the wings slide into the centre spar.  They are held in with 6 bolts a side.

650 Seat Pan and floor panels.  The front section is the centre spar.  Those square black tubes are jigs for the wing spars to slide into (blanks are slid in now for alignment).

Building the 650 floor pan.  That access hole is in the rear of the fuselage and allows access to the rear fuselage components for maintenance/inspection.

Horizontal Stab mounting point.  Those brackets at the very end of the fuselage is where our rudder would go.

Almost completed 650 Quick build fuselage kit.

Nice big cockpit and note the roll bars.

Looking forward from the right into the seat pan and rudder pedal area.

This is actually a 750 (high wing) but the rudder pedals are the same.  Note the brakes are only on the left side.  You can add them to both.  

Landing gear and wing attach points.  The spar slides into that slot and then there are 6 bolt that hold it on (accessible from inside)

Rear attach point for the right wing.

They had a couple of flat panel CNC routers they were using to cut out spars, bell cranks and bulkhead ribs for both 650's and 701's.  They make a truckload full of ribs at a time and then send them down to the US to be installed in their airplanes (or supplied as part of the kits the US sends around the world).  They do all their own metal and fiberglass/ABS work.  They had a neat machine that takes big ABS panels and heats them up and presses them into all sorts of different moulds - basically anything that doesn't require a lot of strength but has compound curves - like our rudder tip!

We started construction about 8:30, took lunch for an hour at noon and by 2:30 were done!  Michael said we were very quick... and worked very efficiently together.  Shawn did everything I did at least as well - his metal working classes from Grade 9 have paid off!

Michael was very patient with us and showed us all sorts of little tricks that are hard to describe on the forums (or that you might gloss over) such as why it is OK to use a flat file (on the inside of components) to brush off burrs on the 6061-T6 Aluminum they use but why you'd also hear people say never to use a flat file on "regular" aircraft aluminum (2024-T4 has a very fine coating of pure aluminum to prevent corrosion that can easily be scraped off while 6061-T6 is completely corrosion protected through and through).

Michael had prepared a nice booklet of the rudder instructions, photo steps, blueprints, etc for us to follow. Rather than go through all the steps we did, here's a sample  GIF movie

that shows the main construction components and the detailed assembly steps on another link.

http://www.zenithair.com/zodiac/tail-as2.htm

Here are a few shots Michael had taken of Shawn and I building the rudder.  I had no idea Shawn had gotten that tall!

Shawn is installing the Cleco fasteners to hold the sheet in place against the ribs and I'm drilling out the pilot holes in the sheet into the ribs so we can blind rivet them together.  You put a cleco in every second hole so you have room to put in the rivets (after deburring all sides and putting corrosion protection (Zinc Chromate primer on the mating surfaces)).

Making sure that the drill doesn't go down too far and mar the finished side of the aluminum.  They install a chunk of rubber hose on the drill against the chuck but it gets gummed up with filings pretty quickly so better not to let it contact at all.  I fell in love with that tiny little Sioux air drill.  It was so light compared to my Princess Auto $21 special.

I'm pulling out the cleco fasteners and Shawn is putting in the blind rivets in the empty holes.  That whole step took about 5 minutes!  

We are holding our completed rudder next to their nearly completed 650 quickbuild fuselage to show where it goes.  I had no idea Shawn had gotten that tall!  Good thing he still listens to me!

As we finished up thanking Michael for the day, we ordered the tail kit (less the rudder of course) and the complete set of plans and blueprints.  We got our serial number.  It's 65-10178.  I suspect that means they've sold 178 CH-650 kits so far (it hasn't been out long enough to do 10000).    It shows up in two weeks!

Our shiny new rudder at home on the new workbench.  Now I just need to find a spot to hang it and go get the tail kit!