2004-09-28
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Today I'm ready to start riveting the skin to the understructure. The book says to place the left skin on a clear surface and that you can use foam, if desired. I was thinking that that's overkill and wasn't going to do it. Besides, I don't have any foam. Then I remembered Liz's exercise mat! So I grabbed it. I'm thinking that I can use it until Liz discovers that it's missing.

Since I'm going to be riveting the skin (HS-601PP), I need to remove the plastic where the rivets go. I've seen some people rivet with the plastic still in place, but that's not for me.

The first piece that you rivet in place is HS-707. You start by clecoing it to the top side. Again, I use a cleco in every hole just to insure that it's clamped as tightly as possible. I then remove one cleco at a time and replace it with a AN426AD3-3.5 rivet.

Here's my first bunch of flush rivets. I had a huge problem with these that I couldn't figure out for the life of me. It seemed that no matter what I did, the rivet would not sit flush against the skin. All the more frustrating was the fact that nobody else seemed to be having this problem. I called Irv about it and he decided that for some reason I either wasn't applying enough pressure to the flush side of the rivet or I was applying too much pressure to the bucking bar. After trying various amounts of pressure at both ends we decided that it had to be something else.

Well, the something else turned out to be the mushroom swivel head I was using. Take a look at the rubber around the head. This rubber is supposed to keep the head from traveling. It also keeps the head away from the rivet. When I switched to the regular head, the problem went away.

The way you get the skin to bend around the shape of the ribs is to temporarily install HS-708 and cleco it to the skin and to HS-707.

Then you cleco HS-708 into place. You are now ready to put rivets into the other side of HS-707. The problem now was that the mini-bucking bar (shown below just above the flashlight) was too big. I needed something skinny that still had enough mass to buck effectively.

This may look like a crowbar to you, but it's my new bucking bar.

It really working well. You can see the gray dot on the end where the rivet was hitting.

This was the most effective way to shoot these. Liz with the gun and me looking into the end of the HS with a flashlight, keeping the bucking bar on the rivet.

Once you get that done, you remove HS-708 and put the Front Spar assembly in. You start by clecoing it to HS-708 and then start putting clecos in HS-702. When you get those in, reinstall HS-708 and blind rivet it to HS-707/HS-702.

I put clecos in every other hole. Tomorrow Liz and I will rivet all of the holes that have no cleco in them, remove the clecos and rivet the rest.