I finally won one!! Rear HS Spar - 4 Hours

I really thought about the project today while I was at work. It seems such a shame that I want to throw in the towel so early. It bothered me to give up. I reasoned that I was only going to get better if I kept with it. I decided to at least take another crack at riveting the horizontal stabilizer spar.

With the lessons learned from the other day, I was careful to check all the rivet call outs on the plans. And of course....they were slightly off.  For example the plans call for HS-609PP to be riveted to HS-603PP with 4-6 rivets.

Well 4-6 rivets are too short according to the gauge.

So I used 4-7 rivets and according to the gauge they were just a hair over....but darn near perfect. So I used those rivets instead. I ended up drilling out every tenth rivet or so and re-doing it as it is difficult to get the rivets set perfectly with the squeezer. I would set a few good ones, and then there would be one that was shifted to the side. (Very obvious if you looked down along the row of shop heads). I seemed to work out my technique for taking out rivets. As usual drilling the machine head is difficult as the drill still wants to wander off center when using the hand drill, but I could always seem to direct the drill head towards center. Using the punch I would break off the head.

Builders Tip -  But the trick I learned was to use big pliers (with electrical tape on the nose to protect the piece) and slowly twist the rivet at the shop head. This became extremely effective to remove rivets. (At first I put tape on the piece, but later found tape on the pliers worked better) 

And after careful work....I finally completed the HS rear spar!!! Yahoo!!!