Again, not much to report. Josie wasn’t feeling well again, so I came up with a plan to shoot the last few LE rivets myself. I’ve been shooting these rivets with the LE in the cradle, which means that the holes toward the edge are facing somewhat downward, which in turn means that the rivets want to fall out. So I set the LE on the workbench facing up, put all the rivets in place, and secured them with rivet tape, like I was going to back rivet. From there, I was able to use my usual technique to shoot the rivets – it actually turned out to be far easier than I’d expected.
Before setting the LE units in place on the spars, I took a moment to check the hole depths of all the LE-spar rivet holes. As I mentioned a while back, I’m going to use Cherry blind rivets in all these holes instead of trying to shoot solid rivets with really limited access. I already have the rivets I need, but I wanted to double-check the material thicknesses against the grip length of the rivets I had. For obvious reasons, I don’t want to use inappropriate rivets here…
That done, I set the LE units in place and went to work clecoing them, both through the spar to the ribs and through the skin to the spar flange. And of course, just as I was finishing this, I found a problem:
That’s the tiedown ring mount on the right wing, and somehow the skin hole is misaligned. I could swear I test-fit the tiedown ring in both of these holes, but with this alignment, I couldn’t get the ring started. Urrrgh. So I got out the Dremel with a cutting bit and carefully enlarged the hole, doing my best to try and keep it round. And there was no good way to deburr it effectively in place, so I went and removed all those stinking clecos I’d just put in, just so I could pull the unit off and spend 30 seconds deburring the hole.
The end result isn’t perfectly round, which kind of bugs me, but it’ll do. I doubt many people will ever notice this really:
I’d hoped to pull a few of the Cherry rivets tonight, but after fixing the tiedown hole, it was after 11 and so I decided to quit. As a final note, here’s the right LE unit all clecoed in place:
