Was gone for about a week on a work trip to Europe with Kriya, and while I was gone, the new rudder wedge arrived from Vans as well as the fixture from Cleveland tools to aid in countersinking it.

Countersunk the new wedge to .007" below flush per guidance from Vans. The edge doesn't really look any better than the first one, so hopefully it will pull up a little bit more when it's bonded/riveted, but this may be as good as it gets. Per Van's, this is definitely as deep as those countersinks should be.

I'm on the fence about whether to use 3M tape vs. pro seal on the rudder wedge, but went ahead and started the elevators so that If I decide to use pro seal I can do everything with one batch.

There are 3 locations on the left elevator where the E-720 stiffeners get a little extra trimmed off the trailing edge. The aft-most hole isn't pilot drilled on them, so even though there's a dimensional callout for how much to shorten them, I went ahead and clecoed them on and match drilled them to make sure I wasn't going to run into an edge distance problem after trimming. I didn't need to bother, there's tons of e.d. left over after trimming to the print dimension.

While I was doing this, I discovered that somehow I had evidently tapered the wrong end of the stiffeners at the 3 inbd-most locations on the right elevator. Everything lines up fine, but it means that the flanges are mirrored and facing the opposite direction of how they are depicted on the print. I stared at it for probably 1/2 hour trying to figure out if that's actually what had happened or if I just had them swapped somehow, then went to research vansairforce for about another hour. I have no idea how this is even possible because the trim lines are just by created by connecting the dots between notches that are already in the angle, but evidently It's easier than you would think, because I'm not the first guy to do it.

I couldn't see how it would cause any problems, but I decided when I started this that I'm going to get factory coverage for any deviation from print that isn't covered by AC43.13 or standard industry practice, so I fired off an email to Van's and they confirmed that it didn't matter which way the flanges faced as long as the top and bottom on each set are opposing so they don't interfere with each other.

Based on that, I pressed on and match drilled, trimmed, and de-burred the stiffeners and skins. Probably 2 hours of work that I managed to stretch into 7, but I'm happy with how everything is going together.