This week I received the missing rod end bearing for the lower rudder hinge. I screwed it in to the suggested depth and did one of about 20 trial fits to the vertical stabilizer.
With the forward spar of the vertical stab in front of the mounting bracket, there was about 1/16" of bow to the rear spar. That doesn't sound like much, but because of the slight variations in holes in the rear spar hinges, this bow ended up making the center hinge hole about 1/8" too far forward. I didn't want to back out the middle rod end bearing that much (and it would probably cause some binding being that far off of the center line), so I removed the vertical stab and attached it to the aft side of the mounting bracket. This is a suggestion in the manual, so apparently not all that uncommon. I had tried this once before and wasn't happy with the result, but with everything bolted down now, this actually lined the hinges up much better. There was almost no bow to the rear spar, so I was able to play with the screwed in distance of each rod end bearing to get them lined up pretty well.
Even though the hinge line was pretty good, I still had to take the rudder off multiple times to get all of the bearings at the right distance so the rudder could swing freely from stop to stop without binding. It was fine except for the very bottom where the rudder's control horn connects. The way they designed that pushes the skins out on both sides, so as-is it rubs the vertical stab at full deflection. After some fiddling I got it to clear ok.
Next up was putting the elevators back on to measure the total deflection of the rudder in relation to the elevators. I didn't bother bolting the elevators to each other since this was all temporary.
The instructions indicate what the measurement should be from the rudder's trailing edge to the outside trailing edge of the elevator when the rudder is at full deflection. Thankfully, it came out perfectly, so no more fiddling.
As much as I'd like to bolt everything together at this point and call it done, there's just not enough room to move around with the tail on. I dismantled it all and moved the parts back upstairs.
