Saturday, December 13, 2014

HS Front Spar - 3 hours



Work has been quite crazy and not to mention I have also decided to put some time into skiing this winter, leaving little time for the RV build. Tonight I managed to get a little work done on the horizontal stabilizer. I dimpled all of the horizontal stabilizer parts (with the exception of the skins) and started to rivet. I have a tad bit of difficulty getting the pneumatic squeezer set up right. The trick is to set it so that it just under-squeezes the rivet and then it's an easy adjustment to get it dialed in. I think I may need to practice more and create a spread sheet showing the initial measurements for a given rivet size with a yoke/die combination.
The flush rivets were set without much trouble, however the first AN470AD4-7 rivet was squeezed too tight. I drilled the head of the rivet off and tried to pull the rivet out with pliers. Since the material was so thick, pulling out the rivet was impossible. I then had to drill the rivet out with a #30 bit, but resulting in an over sized hole. I need to use a larger -5 rivet. I completed the rest of the riveting with very good results. I only have one rivet that is set a bit close to the maximum (One rivet was not set to my liking, so I managed to do a good job drilling it out. Replaced with another AN470AD4-7 and bucked it...but did it a little too much. It's right on the line for spec)