Yesterday, I did what I said I'd do and the rudder was much better. Advanced the throttle to get the system active, moved the airplane around, and watched the rudder closely to see any changes or drifting. It was close to neutral; just 3 turns in on the clevis made me happy and I decided to fly it.
At the field, the only change to start-up was to introduce ailerons by adding the wing. When I switched on, the #@*&%! rudder went so far to the left that even full right trim at the tx wouldn't get it to neutral. Several retries failed to get the rudder to neutral.
This morning, I used a servo driver to operate both the rudder and elevator servos and confirmed both to be one spline forward from servo neutral (this is a change I made while setting up the airplane to get geometry to what I think is correct and what I've been doing most of my life flying 72 MHz...) I also rebound the system without any improvement.
Does SAFE and/or AS3X need the servo output arm to be at servo neutral to operate properly?
Switching back to servo spline center seems to exacerbate the problem.
Is the pushrod one piece of wire in a sleeve?