Big Day of Progress

The title says it, we made a lot of progress today. We packed everything up (well almost.. we had to make a couple trips back to the house) and took it all to our workshop. We were able to back dimple the rudder skins and back rivet the stiffeners on. This took a little finessing to get our method down and before we did we made a few dents in the thin .020" rudder skins. After the first row of holes we had our technique down. Initially we used a back dimpling rivet set and a steel plate to dimple the rudder skins. The 3X rivet gun proved to be a bit to strong and we got a few lovely impressions of the back dimpling rivet set in our skins.. Then we took out the set and decided to tap it with the side of one of our bucking bars. This was much more controllable and you can hear a distinct "ping" when the dimple is done.

Here's our back dimpling rivet set (left) and our back riveting set (right). The left one cost us $50.... was it worth it? Yes. The face is mounted with a swivel and almost elminiates the potential of denting your skins. Though it does only dimple 3/32" holes, that's the majority of the holes in the airplane, so we don't really need one that does 1/8" holes.

Once the rudder skins and stiffeners became one, we moved on to dimpling the vertical stab skins. Since this is .032" thick, we didn't have to use our previous method of back dimpling. We decided to use the rivet gun with the set and it turned out beautiful, plus it was a bit faster.

We then moved onto the somewhat daunting task of riveting the skins to the skeleton. We've got the hang of it now, but the first few rivets proved to be a bit dificult. In order to somewhat preserve our primer on the inside of our skins and on our ribs and spar, we wrapped our bucking bar in som 3M masking tape. It just provides a bit of cusion and prevents scratches. After we got our technique down we got into our rythm and the rest of the rivets went quite smoothly. The AD3-? rivets are much easier to squeeze too compared to the AD4's, this was a nice treat and they turned out very nice. We set our first blind rivets on the airplane tonight too, but these were simple to set, and once the rear spar was all riveted to the vertical stab it was complete and it's definitely inspiring to continue on!