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!!!
