Finally Building a Rudder

Once again I'm learning about all the interesting ways not to do things.  I taped the leading edges of the rudder faces together, but I tried to do edge down. That was a mistake. This would have been fine if I had 6 hands. You are trying to hold; two rudder faces (with no good place to hold on to), hold the tape in position, get all tape even and pressed onto rudder faces. That's all.  Anyway next time I will set up the rudder faces (somehow) so I can just worry about tape.  Eventually I got the tape on and made little tape dams at the ends to hold the epoxy mix from spilling out.

My next fiasco was the mixing of the glue. I spent a lot of time carefully mixing the glue-filler (measured weight of epoxy, calculated needed weights of fillers, measured fillers).

It didn't take long to realize I made the mix to the wrong proportions.  I ended up with the fill putty used for fairing, waaaay to thick. So I diluted this with extra epoxy until I got it to where it seemed like it was behaving the way the pictures in Bernd's instructions look. I settled on a consistency that is thicker than ketchup but thinner than mayonnaise. For lack of a better way to describe it.  The last bit of mess was that it took more epoxy than I thought so I had to re-create my epoxy goop three times. But by the end I was getting pretty comfortable with how the fillers behave.  With all that said I think the results look good. Although to proof will be seen tomorrow.