Sunday, August 14, 2016

Started riveting top skin on left wing 3.5 hours

What an incredibly frustrating build day. Eugene had come over to lend a hand with setting the wing skin rivets. We started off alright. We needed to buck a handful of rivets on the Spar/Leading edge that I just couldn't get with the squeezer. Next, we mixed up about 35 grams of proseal and spread it all over the wing walk doubler, and cleco'd the skins on.

Now we were ready to begin the skins. I started off with using AN426AD3-4.5 rivets for the wing walk doubler as those were exactly the size needed on the right wing (it's .5 upsize from the plans). This made perfect sense as we had applied a thin layer of proseal to the wing walk doubler/underside of skin. However, the first few rivets just turned out crappy. They were folding over, so we would drill out and try again, this time it was worse. We just could not get them to work. We even switched gun and bar positions but it didn't solve it. In fact that was a worse idea since we were so comfortable in our positions from the previous right wing.

I must have drilled out about 30 rivets before we even had 3 wing walk doubler ribs done. JUST awful. At some point we figure out that the AD3-4.5 rivets were too long and we dropped down to AD3-4 rivets which were the right length and matched the plans, but it didn't really improve our success rate all that much. We figure that it must be a combination of the tank dimples that I used on the ribs and doubler and the addition of wet proseal that just made setting them difficult. Who knows.

Finally we battled enough to call it a day. We had set all of the rivets on the inboard top skin. 

Riveted the Bracket to the Flap Spar - 1 hour

Not much work today on the flaps, but I managed to rivet the FL706 brackets onto the flap spars. As soon as I was finished, Eugene had arrived to help set some rivets on the wing skins.