Rudder stiffeners, found a defect

I finished fabricating the rudder stiffeners. Each stiffener had to be trimmed to length. As you go from bottom to top, each stiffener is shorter than the next. I used the tin snips to trim, and used the scotch brite wheel to round the edges and debur. Here are the stiffeners laid out on the left rudder skin:

I match drilled the stiffeners to the right skin and put everything aside, making sure to bundle and mark the right stiffeners so they do not get mixed up with the left ones.

I started match drilling the left skin to the stiffeners when I encountered the following prepunched hole pattern:

You can see clearly that the hole near the 7" mark on the ruler is out of alignment. Here is a shot from the other side:

Unfortunately this is a blocking issue. The hole in the skin does not line up with the hole in the stiffener. I sent an email to Van's with a detailed description of the problem. I am hoping they will send me a new skin with the correct hole pattern. It looks like I'll have to put the left rudder skin aside for now pending what I hear from Van's.

I can try to move on to the rudder skeleton, and my replacement rib for the HS should arrive this week, so I should be able to get back to that.

Time spent: 2 hours (25 total)