Major Sections

03 July 2013

Wings: Top skins. Right side 99% complete.

I have just A) 5 rivets on the outboard aileron bracket, where it attaches to the rear spar and B) 5 rivets to go where the rear spar doubler and fork meet.  These latter rivets have me perplexed.  How to buck them?  Seems like I need a sharp footed bucking bar (I ultimately used this one).


Ended up with one more NAS1097AD4-3.5 "oops" rivet (Rivet of Shame).  This one was on the J-stiffener between the 7th and 8th ribs.  My bucking partner and I were out of sync and the rivet sat way proud.  When drilling it out, I got the head off just fine, but I went too far with the drill on the body and ended up with a thin circumference of the body in the hole.  Could not get the sucker out, so I upped the hole to a #30 and slapped in the "oops".  No big deal.  The right wing now has a total of 3 "oops" rivets.

And here's the pretty right wing.  There are three rivets in the ribs that I plan to remove.  I don't like the shape of their shop heads.  Hopefully, the dimples don't crack.




Riveting the J-stiffener was super fast since I used the straight extended set rather than the extended offset.  Much more of the impact energy goes to the piston on the end of the set.  Literally takes less than a second on the trigger at 85 psi to slap down the shop head to size.  Really speeds things up.  Finally, the roll pin broke three times.  Good to have replacements ready.

Looks like riveting the right top skins takes about 17 hours.  I have no idea how others do it so quickly.  Wish I knew the secret.  Can't wait to find out how long the bottoms skins will take.

1 comment:

  1. I feel better about how slow my wing skin riveting is going... It took three sessions to do one wing. Hoping the second wing will go a little faster with experience.

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