Rivet QA, wing cart work

Tonight I just went out, inspected the rivets we shot last night, and marked the few that needed to be shot a little more. All told it was maybe 20 or so, not bad at all. It would have been a short work session, except that last night Josie also pointed out that the rivets through the leading edge skin and into the spar looked like their shop heads were undersize. Sure enough, I checked and they were. Guess I was a little overeager that night. I got out the squeezer and easily fixed all of the rivets on the bottom, but the tops ones were now inaccessible since the top skins were on. So after fixing the few bad rivets from last night, we went down the line on both wings and hit up all those LE rivets again.

So tomorrow I’m going to go in to work early so I can head out early and shoot for getting the wings off the stands and the storage cart built. I did run into a slight hiccup tonight – I bought some adhesive foam weatherstripping to pad the end of the cart where the leading edge will sit in it, but when I tried a test-fit with the wings, the weatherstripping gripped the LE skin and pulled right off the wood face. So that’s not going to work like I’d hoped. I may need to get a different material or something, I dunno. Or I could cut narrow strips of the carpet I have lying around and attach it with carpet tape, but that’ll be tedious.

Update: I went out and played with the cart stuff again. This time I stuck the weatherstripping in place with carpet tape instead of relying on the rather weal weatherstripping adhesive. I also left the paper backing on the non-adhesive side of the weatherstripping to promote it not sticking to the aluminum skin. End result: it goes onto the leading edge nicely.

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