Friday, November 14, 2014

Completed the VS - ready for pre-cover inspection - 4 hours

Riveting the spars and ribs together took a bit of thought. Some rivets you need to buck, some can be squeezed. I ended up drilling a couple of rivets out as I didn't set them enough, and when I went to give them a bit more, I gave them the smiley face on the head. I placed the rivets so that all shop heads are visible during the precover inspection.





 I then worked on cleco'ing the skin onto the structure then bucking rivets. I was surprised how well the rivets were to buck on the skin. It was much more easier than bucking the larger #4 rivets. I quickly was able to pick up the feel and sound of a properly bucked rivet. All in all the skin riveting went extremely well. I only had to drill out 5 or 6 rivets and re-do. The drilled out rivets came out so much easier than when working on the rear spars. I only had a two slight issues, only where trying to get rivets out holes where there was multiple pieces nested together. In one instance I had bent the very bottom rib flange tab while trying to take the rivet out. It took a bit of head scratching to figure out how to fix this. I thought about using a cherry max rivet, but then I decided to use my Dow Corning 3145 RTV to "glue" the slightly bent tab back into place. I then drilled the holes to #30 to accept an oops rivet.

I only have 4-3.5 oops rivets for now, I will order some longer ones and then buck the two needed rivets.