Andrew

You should keep finishing completely separate from building and control installation. Assemble the airframe and put in the controls before installing a square inch of covering. At some point your plane should be ready to fly except for the missing finish. This way you can verify that everything goes together correctly, check all alignments and confirm that the controls work properly. Dissassembling the model for finishing and then reassembling might seem like too much extra work, but it isn't.

Pushrods in their housings have friction, while cables move with little resistance. Pull pull cable systems neutralize more accurately and give faster response than a pushrod system. So in order to take full advantage of the pull pull system it is important that the cables not touch anything on their way to the rudder control horns. Unless the plane is designed around the pull pull system guessing where the cables exit the fuselage usually involves a bit of trial and error, thus the importance of doing this before covering. By the way, on smaller planes it might be necessary to cross the cables before they exit the fuselage.

I'll snap a few photos and send them in a later post. One is the set up on a 80" span Ultra Hots scratch built and the other is a Pacific Aeromodels .60 size Edge.

Al Zalner