Moving the vertical

I have a 9a that has an out of trim issue. When at cruise with no fairings or pants, the ball is out to the right a full ball width. I dont have a heavy wing other than what is normal for fuel or passengers. I can straighten it with a large trim tab but it is fairly big and looks bad.
I thought maybe I could move the offset of the vertical stabilizer with a new front bracket and remake the fairing. Is there anyone that has done this? Any idea on how far it would have to be moved to be effective? Does anyone have any input as to this being a bad idea?

Mine was out of trim by a half ball to the left early phase one without the fairings or pants. With the fairings and pants installed, trim moved to a half ball right! I had set the fairings and pants with a laser and thought they were perfect. After messing with them for dozens of flights, I couldn't make any significant improvement so ended up installing a trim wedge on the rubber about 4 inches long. Now ball is centered.

I wouldn't make any changes until pants and fairings are installed.

I?ve seen a lot of RVs that suffer from the problem of ?not rigged right?. Rigging is an iterative, time consuming process - far from the ?one and done? as implied in the plans.

My suggestions:
- Go back to the plans and verify the VS is aligned properly. Unless you have something very wrong with the fuselage not being true, this will tell the story. Here, as with all rigging efforts, a second set of eyes is a big help.
- Fly without any wheel pants or fairings - adjusting rigging until the ball is in the center and you do not have a heavy wing.
- Once done, then install the pants and fairings. If the ball goes out with the pants and/or fairings, fix them until you have the ball back in the center.

My point. Fixing out of rig problems by adding more out of rig stuff yields a pseudo in rig for a narrow speed range, and adds drag on top of drag.

Carl

Something to keep in mind....
The RV-9, when built per the plans, already has a built in offset to the vertical stab. Over the years the amount of offset has proven to be a pretty good average to work with the majority of the RV-9 fleet.

There are many aerodynamic influences acting on the airplane that make the idea that you should be able to make adjustments so that the airplane flys perfectly in trim bare naked of fairings, and that it still will after you add them as long as the were aligned perfectly.

As we know, the dynamic flow from the propeller spirals around the airplane. That means the relative wind that acts on all of the leg fairings and wheel pants does not meet them perfectly aligned with the longitudinal axis of the airplane.

Because of that, even perfectly aligned leg fairings and wheel pants can have a negative influence on trim (particularly the nose gear leg on an A model).
For that reason, putting much effort (especially doing major modifications) into trim adjustments, before the airplane is complete, is a waste of time.

The reason I was trying to correct the trim at this time is because the plane is still unpainted. My thought being that I would try to correct a trim problem before adding a bunch of variables with fairings and pants.

Check the rigging and a "gotcha"

1. Check the aileron and flap rigging, and then check it again. There's a little gotcha that I don't recall seeing in the instructions/plans; make sure the elevator is in trail AND lock it in place with a set of clamps before attempting to adjust the rigging. Why? Due to the control geometry in side-by-side RV's, the distance from the base of the control stick to the aileron bell crank will change if the elevator is displaced. Don't believe me? Lock an aileron in place and then move the elevator and watch the opposite aileron move up/down ~3/16" or so...

2. Don't shim the rudder until the wheel pants, gear leg fairings, intersection fairings are installed...