Shorter night in the garage than I figured for tonight. Had some things to do around the house and didn’t get out there until about 8:00. Then it didn’t take long before my sore back made me decide to go in and rest. (Side note: I apparently got this sore back from mowing the grass, of all things. I’m not that old, am I? *sigh*)
Anyways, my MSP-43 blind rivets from Spruce arrived as expected, but before I riveted the control horn brace into place, I wanted to verify what I needed to to the four skin rivets on each side in order to use the CS4-4 blind rivets there. I knew I’d need to drill out to #30, but what about the dimple? Luckily, I have a number of scrap pieces sitting around. I used one of an old ruined rib as my experiment piece; this was a particularly good test, since it was already drilled and dimpled for -3 flush rivets. So I drilled to #30, dropped a CS4-4 in…yup, sits proud. Out came the 1/8 dimple die set, I redimpled the hole…rivet sits nice and flush. Good to go.
So I clecoed the skin back to the skeleton one last time, and drilled the eight holes in question out to #30, pulled everything apart, deburred, and dimpled to the larger size. Easy enough; now I clecoed the horn brace back into place and proceeded to set the MSP-43 rivets between the horn and the brace. Next were the three solid rivets between the brace and the root rib, also easy.
Before clecoing the skin back into place for the last time, I needed to put a dab of RTV at the trailing edge where each pair of stiffeners meet. According to the instructions, this ties the stiffeners together and prevents cracking of the skin from vibration. All I know is that it feels a little odd to take my shiny clean skin and shoot a mess of RTV in there, but oh well.
Finally, I got the skin clecoed on, and this was the point where I decided to call it a night. All the remaining skin rivets can be hit with the squeezer, so they should go quickly tomorrow. The only place I see the potential for delays are at the trailing edges, where clearance is tight. Hopefully I can get in there with the thin-nose squeezer yoke, but if not, the plans provide for alternate blind rivets in there. We’ll see how that goes. And, of course, how my edge-rolling setup works out.