Today was succesful and busy! Dad and I woke up bright and early today and got our stuff together and put it all in the truck. We made our way over to the airport and got some breakfast at the cafe and talked to a couple of friends, Jack being one of them, who has helped us a ton already and offers much respected advice. After our breakfast we went on down to our storage garage and got to work on the HS. We started by finishing up the back dimpling on the HS-601 skin and this took us about twenty minutes.
Once the dimpling was done we went straight to riveting. Following the manual we started by clecoing HS 707 to the top of the skin and then riveting it. This wasn't too difficult, but the second step proved to be tricky. We clecoed on HS 706 at the tip of the stab and then clecoed the bottom flange of 707 to the skin. At first we thought it wasn't going to be too hard. Wrong. Clecos are a wonderful thing, when they're being used under low-stress situations that is. Without taping the trailing edge of the stabilizer the clecoes would just pull out of their holes on towards the leading edge. We copied Mike Bullock's method and used a block of wood sandwiched between the skin and the bottom flange of HS 707, and used duct tape holding the trailing edges together to keep it in place. This made it a bit more workable and we were able to install 707 exclusively with solid AN rivets.
After 707 was all set in, we installed the front spar assembly and clecoed it all together. Using blind rivets (we realized that we were only supplied with about seven LP 3-3 blind rivets, but luckily Jack had quite a supply of these, so after a quick visit to the airport we were back in business) we secured HS 708, 702 and 707 together and began riveting the front spar to the skin. After ten rivets or so we finally got into the groove and moved right along. 708 was next, and was riveted to the skin after the front spar. We used the AN4 rivets to attach 702 to 706 and these were the last rivets that required using the rivet gun. The last of the rivets were able to be set with the hand squeezers and we saved this for when we got home. These came out beautiful and it really felt like it had some structural integrity! We blind riveted 708 to the rear spar assembly and the horizontal stabilizer was all riveted! (well almost, see the error post that follows this.)
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