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Thursday, June 28, 2012

Started riveting left skin to forward spar and ribs: 10 hours

I ended up getting a lot done by putting in a long day. I got off to a slow start. Riveting the skin onto the ribs and spar involves some very tight locations.

I also spent about an hour removing an replacing a pull rivet inside the structure that I placed incorrectly. In the course of drilling out the bad rivet the hole was enlarged. Fortunately I had planned ahead for the mistake and I had a selection of slightly oversize CherryMax rivets on hand. These pull rivets are actually much stronger than the ones spec'd in the plans.

I also had one conventional driven rivet securing the tip rib to the spar that I was not happy with so I replaced it. That went fairly quickly. In general most riveting mistakes can be corrected without scrapping the part but the corrections can consume a lot of time.

The other challenge of the day was all the tight space riveting. It took me some time before I figured out a technique that worked for fitting my hands inside the structure to hold the bucking bar.




Tight space but only a few rivets:
 

Starting to rivet the skin to the forward spar:
 

Tight spaces and a lot of rivets ... Slow going at first