Rudder Closed!

I knew this was going to be hard. But it was much harder than I anticipated. The thing is that you are forcing the plywood to do something that it really does not like. The first clue came when I had to chase my tail a little just to get the rudder and the wedges in the jig all at the same time.

At this point it soon became clear that the clamps, which I thought would be optional, were very much required.  The only way to compress the rudder down was to crank down on the clamps.  It was taking quite a bit of force and I soon found that the hand-squeeze type clamps could not compress the rudder.  Luckily I had been discussing this project with local legend Bob Burt. He recommended that I get some heavier duty clamps.  Double lucky that I actually took his advise and bought 2 lever action type clamps.  With the big boy clamps I could keep compressing the rudder.

I got into a rhythm of compressing each corner up to and then through level.  In another lucky break the wedge is at a low enough angle and the friction is such that once the wedge is advanced it stays put due to friction.  I probably could have dealt with this if it hadn't worked out that way but having things stay in place was a help. The picture below is before I applied epoxy. I left one clamp on the wedge just in case the friction-lock was marginal.

So after I applied epoxy to the above joint I started with the carbon fiber. With the wedges holding the rudder in a compressed position it was not too hard to layer in epoxy and three layers of uni-directional carbon fiber.

Here is a picture showing the wedges holding the rudder compressed and three plys of CF installed. It was a good thing I took this picture since it got me thinking...more on that in a moment.

With the CF installed I just applied epoxy to the edge and clamped the trailing edge of the rudder closed. Its hard to tell here but I covered the bearing surface of some scrap lumber with plastic tape. To keep from gluing the rudder to the scrap lumber used as a bearing block. 

I used every clamp I own to try to get some uniformity in the closure.  At this point I figured I was done and was getting ready to go find some lunch, but thought I would look at some of the pictures. 

That's when I saw the picture from above that got me thinking. Thinking that maybe I just glued my rudder to the wedges at the ends. So I undid a couple of clamps and pulled the wedges out.  Everything seems to stay in place. The result is below. If all turns out as hoped tomorrow. I will be repeating all these steps for the other rudder.

I was thinking of writing a lessons learned paragraph but nothing that earth-shattering comes to mind. Its harder to cut carbon fiber than I thought, and of course the heavier action clamps were a must. I think more than explicit lessons learned this is more about experience gained. Bernd says this all the time, that much of boat building is getting in there and learning how the materials behave. As usual Bernd is the man.