I started tonight's session by assembling the doubler plates onto the rudder spar and riveting them in place with the hand squeezer. A few of the rivets were a little challenging to get due to the flange or the rib getting in the way, but they got riveted in the end.
Unfortunately, I realized that the nutplates that I need to be riveting onto some of the doubler plates were still in the back-ordered items for this empennage kit. I'm also still missing the VA-140 trailing edge extrusion that I'll also need for later in this rudder section. So I'm moving on and will try to skip around the steps that are missing parts, but hopefully not advance too far ahead that will complicate installing the missing parts when they finally arrive. The Vans Aircraft kit status page says that a backorder shipment is being prepared for me, so maybe these parts will arrive soon.
The next thing I could do was start to cleco together the reset of the ribs to ensure I have all of the pieces in the right places. This was pretty satisfying seeing the shape the rudder start to form, and it also helps to understand which pieces still need to be dimpled.
What's next? I need to finish dimpling a few more pieces, and then I might be able to start dimpling the rudder skins too.