And so the theme continues, chipping away at this a bit at a time. Previously, I was happy to be finished with the “annoying” riveting. In my mind, I just had to go around the perimeter squeezing skin rivets, plus a handful of structure rivets, and be done. Of course, it wasn’t quite that easy.
I started with the easy part – setting the blind rivets that attach the rear spar to the center main ribs. Next came the large rivets that attach the rear spar to the root and tip ribs. The root ribs weren’t too bad, but the tip ribs required some extra work. A couple of these holes got damaged during disassembly, so I drilled those out to #21 and used -5 rivets in place of the -4s. That required finding where in the world I put the stock of -5 rivets I bought a while back, along with the proper tools.
Next I started in on the tip ribs. These should have been easy, but I got a bit complacent at first. It’s a bit harder to mess up rivets when squeezing rather than bucking…but not impossible. I wasn’t careful in holding the skin side of the squeezer flush and so I ended up with a few proud rivets, which I’ll need to drill out and replace. I decided to just keep squeezing and mark those to be dealt with later. Then I got most of the root rib rivets squeezed as well, before deciding it was time to call it a night.
That just leaves a few more hard-to-get-to rivets on the ribs, and all the rear spar rivets. I really should be able to get that done in one more work session. Let’s see if I live to regret typing that last sentence…