Thursday, January 15, 2015

Rudder Assembly Ongoing - 3.5 hours

I decided to put some work into assembling the rudder. I can only rivet one side of the skins so that the MD-RA can inspect it before I closed it up. All in all, the skins when on extremely nice and I cleco'd the trailing edge on. I set up the squeezer and I set the majority of rivets on the rudder. All in all it went really well. I ended up having to drill out and re-set 3 rivets that I was not happy with. One rivet at the very top gave me quite a bit of brain damage. I set too short a rivet (not paying attention). So I drilled it out to #30 and tried to set an oops rivet but it started to bend. So I drilled out the oops rivet. Time to think...I might need to buck this rivet as I do not want to risk bending it and having to drill it out again.