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.

Dimpled the VS skin - 1.5hrs

I spent the evening dimpling the Vertical stabilizer. Took a bit of time to set up in the basement so I didn't have to work in a cold garage. (It was -20deg C outside) and I didn't want to heat up the garage for just that.

I finally won one!! Rear HS Spar - 4 Hours

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!!!

VS Spar Fail! - 0.5 Hours

Well that's it. I have completely hit a wall.  In my attempts to drill out the bad rivets located closest to the brackets I have ruined the entire VS Rear Spar. I'm so defeated right now. If this is how the entire project is going to go I don't think I want to continue. It's just a lesson in frustration and spending money.

I really hate to give up, but spending so many hours and have it go all for nothing is really depressing. I would feel better about it if I felt I was making progress, but it seems that doing it wrong is just so easy, but doing it right is just so hard. The cherry on top is that you can spend so much time on perfecting a number of pieces, but ruin them all in an instant with a bad drill-out.

I am seriously considering throwing in the towel on this as bridging this gap seems to be impossible. I afraid to invest more time and money into this as I am just not anywhere close to where I need to be skill wise.

EAA Meeting #2

I ended up taking my VS rear spar to the meeting to have some of the other members look over my work. All in all its as it was expected. Some rivets look good, a few need to be redone (The ones closest to the bottom brackets). One member has suggested bucking the rivets rather than sqeezing or using the back rivet set. He said that bucking them would allow me to get a whole lot closer. He was very encouraging and mentioned that it takes a while to develop the skills. He said that often folks will end up redoing their entire empennage at the very end of the project because their skills have improved so much by the time they get through the wings. I suppose I just have to chug away at it. if it works...great. If not, Oh well.

Started to Rivet the VS Spar - 3 hours

Frustration!! I started to rivet the VS rear spar today. Things did not go as well as I hoped.

I ended up having real issues with getting rivets set with the squeezer. Many of my rivets on the brackets where folding over! I'd drill them out, only to have it happen again. I find drilling out rivets extremely nerve racking as there is such little room for error. The easier part for me is to drill the machined head, but getting the shop head and the rivet shaft out is really tough without scraping the work underneath. I also found it extremely difficult to set the rivets that are located at the bottom brackets as the rivets are extremely close to the vertical portions of the bracket. After some time, i noticed that some of my troubles came as I was using the rivets as called out on the plans. Many of them were just slightly over the 1.5 dia rule of thumb and I noticed that if I trimmed them down ever so slightly with the rivet cutter (So that they fit perfectly with the rivet guage) my chances of successfully setting them with the squeezer dramatically improved.  I decided to stop for the night and get some opinions at the EAA meeting tomorrow.

Riveted Stiffeners to Rudder - 3.5 hours

I started in on back riveting the stiffeners onto the rudder skins. It took me a little time to get the hang of it and had to drill some of the rivets out. It always seemed like the rivets at the end were a bit tough to get right. I used some Dow Corning #3145 RTV (Clear) on the last part of the stiffener at the trailing edge. Drilling the rivets out went extremely well, however i was a tad bit concerned geting the aluminum pieces that I drilled out on the ends where I used RTV. I was careful to wipe the excess RTV off so that it would not interfere with the trailing edge piece. But in the end everything turned out well and by the third or fourth stiffener I was rockin and rollin.