What we have here is a chicken and egg scenario. The rudder has been ready to install and rig since I got the fiberglass tips finished a couple of weeks ago. I thought it would be a quick project to knock out, but of course it never goes that way.

I had decided to route the wiring for the tail strobe per Vans OP-56 drawing, which has you rivet a wire tie mount to the fwd face of the rudder spar at a hole that already exists in the doubler for the lower heim joint. Unfortunately theres quite a thick material stackup there and the print calls for an LP4-5 rivet there. OP-56 is a generic print for all Vans models, so I guess that makes sense, but guess how many LP4-5 rivets are require for an RV-7?...hob about a big fat zero.

In the picture below, you can see where the mount is riveted through a hole in the doubler. there is a matching hole on the other side of the heim joint that doesn't go all the way through. I questioned this when I was putting the rudder together and Vans tech support told me that doubler is used in lots of different models and those two holes are predrilled for the RV-14. They told me I could match drill teh spar and and rivet them or just ignore them on the RV-7, so I chose to ignore them. Fast fwd a couple of years, and now OP-56 tells me that I can use that same hole for this wire tie mount. Handy! All this is to explain why there's an empty rivet hole on one side of this doubler in the picture, but I digress.

Anyway, right before we left for family vacation and sun n fun I ordered a few rivets from Vans.

Once I had the proper rivet installed I hung the rudder with the appropriate hardware, then routed and secured the wire to the tail strobe. I thought I'd be smart and install the lower rudder cap after that, but it turns out there isn't enough room to put it in place with the rudder installed because the tailwheel spring is in the way. So I pulled the lower two hinge bolts back out and was able to swing the rudder out enough to slip the lower fairing cap on, then secure everything again.

I torqued the fasteners via a Crowfoot and some careful positioning, and then riveted on the upper and lower cap fairings.

Note- I see a lot of people install the lower fairing with nutplates so they can get it off to work on the wiring to the tail light and I can't for the life of me understand why this is a thing. I just shielded the wire with some abrasion sleeve and left enough service loop that I can unscrew it from the rudder and pull it aft enough to unplug the spade connectors, then cut the wire tie at the mount that was installed a coupe of paragraphs up in this entry, then you can pull the wire out fwd and remove the rudder just like any other rudder. eeze peeze.

I've also seen people take all sorts of time and effort to make sure the rudder and V/S upper caps match perfectly by adding micro or body filler to one or the other. While I understand the sentiment, I don't think I'm going to do that. The curvature has an ever so slight mis-match between the two, but aerodynamically its insignificant, and I don't think it's worth the weight penalty of adding filler back there to try to get it show plane perfect.

At this point I also drilled a drain hole at the lowest part of the fairing also water doesn't get trapped in there. It's a 1/4" hole which seems huge, but it's per print taht it's supposed to be that size.

The last think I did was to run the magnetometer interference test again. I had done it when I installed the magnetometer, but there was lots of stuff not installed/functional at that time, including the tail strobe. Now that teh airplane is put together and is functional, it seemed like I should probably put it through its paces.

This test is somewhat lengthy. It suggests you runs pretty much everything through its paces; Box the controls, run the trim, strobes on and off, basically every combination and configuration you can imagine. I'm happy to report that it passed, with a high of only 17% of the interference limit reached in one configuration (Strobe on, elevator full up, trim servo running).