Not a lot to report tonight, Josie was able to help me move the left wing to the bench so I could squeeze the top skin-rear spar rivets. That concludes riveting on the top skins, with the exception of a few rivets on the right spar reinforcement that I have to replace.

With that done, I decided to cleco the left aileron gap fairing into place, mainly just to see it there. I’m going to wait before I match drill this, maybe tomorrow night; then I can do both flap braces at the same time. Those have to have a bit of trimming done before they can be clecoed and match drilled, though. More on that tomorrow (or whenever I do it)

I was originally going to work on the skin-spar rivets for the left wing today, but Josie pulled a muscle or something in her back yesterday, so I couldn’t really ask her to help move that wing to the workbench. Instead I decided to finish the right wing riveting and then work on the aileron brackets and maybe the flap brace and aileron gap seal.

The leftover rivets on the right skin were all in the vicinity of the inboard reinforcement forks. The outboard group of these were pretty easy to do with the squeezer, but further inboard, where there’s a second small reinforcement plate, things got tougher. Even the thin-nose yoke wouldn’t fit between the unsqueezed rivet tail and the shop heads on the reinforcement. I tried using the rivet gun and a thin bucking bar on those, but the results were rather unpleasant:

After drilling out that rivet, I decided to change my approach. The plans call for -4 length rivets here, but they’re a little on the short side, so I was using -4.5s instead. A quick test showed that a -4 rivet was enough shorter that I *could* squeeze with the thin-nose yoke in that case. So I decided that in this case, having slightly undersize heads was a better choice than the damage that might result from continuing to try and shoot the longer rivets.

With those rivets done, it was on to the aileron brackets. An immediate problem presented itself here: The bottommost rivets between the brackets and the spar are supposed to be flush rivets, so those holes need to be countersunk. This would have been better done before the entire bracket was assembled, but that ship has definitely sailed. I spent quite a bit of time trying to figure out a way to countersink here. My “trimmed” cage fit in place OK, but the drill chuck conflicted with the bracket body, so it was no use. So I decided to try and work something out using the drill press. First I tried chucking the extension for my deburring tool in the drill press (so I could then screw the countersink bit into it), but that did not go well. When I turned on the drill press, that extension wobbled briefly before ejecting itself at high speed and bouncing off my forearm. This left a nice bruise on my arm and also bent that extension, thereby ruining it.

But hey, since it was ruined, I might as well modify it for my current task. So I cut off the bent portion and now I was able to securely chuck it in the drill press:

My strategy here was to use the drill press table height as a way to set countersink depth. I’d put it at a height where full extension of the press gave me a proper countersink. I was skeptical of whether I could be very accurate this way, but a couple of test runs on scrap showed that it worked surprisingly well. In no time I had the brackets countersunk. Problem solved!

Of course there was another problem. Each inboard brackets interfered with the shop head of the skin rivet above it. My first tactic to remedy this was to squeeze the skin rivets a bit more; I got them down to minimum acceptable height but there was still interference, so I resorted to filing the tops of the brackets to provide clearance:

I shot a bit of touch-up primer on the brackets and let them dry a bit outside while I turned my attention to the outboard brackets. Riveting these was fun; there wasn’t good access for the squeezer, so I had to use the gun. Even better, there wasn’t good access to use my normal straight set, so I resorted to a double offset set. I really don’t like using that thing, though I made use of a VAF tip to prevent the set from rotating while I was shooting (and proving the duct tape is indispensable):

The reason I don’t like the double offset set is that it’s tough to keep the set hitting straight down. This was how I ruined a wing rib back when I was riveting it to the main spar, and it bit me again here. I had one bracket rivet that I couldn’t seem to get fully set. After a couple of hits, I went at it again and the manufactured head actually popped right off. I’d been inadvertently applying a side load to it, enough to shear the head right off:

Well, at least it was easy to drill out. But that got me looking at that rivet right under it, which I was pretty sure I’d smeared the head on as well. I decided to drill it out and replace it. Well, turns out I was right about the head being smeared; I carefully drilled in the center of the head, and what I saw after popping the head off was that I’d made a second hole in the bracket about 1/16 off-center from the original:

Well, the bracket was clearly toast at this point. The good news was that I’d only need to replace this angle piece, and not the whole assembly, assuming I didn’t foul anything else up while removing it. So it was time to go to town drilling out the rest of the rivets. I managed to do it without further damaging the bracket, but when I pulled the bracket off, I discovered that I’d drilled through the bracket on that original hole and into the spar reinforcement:

Well, at least it’s not all the way through into the spar. But now I get to drill out even more rivets, and the reinforcement has to be replaced as well. (grumble) Some of the rivets holding that reinforcement in place were surprisingly stubborn. It took a while to get them all out, but finally the reinforcement was removed without any further damage:

The good news is the the outboard bracket on the left wing went on OK, probably because the riveting position was less awkward:

So now I’ve got some parts to order. I’m also going to order some stuff from Avery, specifically a long straight rivet set for situations like this. The straight set should allow me to set these rivets without the nasty side load tendency of the offset. I won’t be trying to rivet the inboard brackets until I get that in.

I’m not sure what I’ll work on this week – maybe the skin rivets on the left wing if Josie can help me move it, otherwise I guess I’ll go back to working on the ailerons. I can get the skins dimpled and then rivet the stiffeners in place, maybe finish the trailing edge bends once I build another bending brake.

Kind of a token night of work this time. I considered taking the night off, but I like the feeling of momentum I have on the project right now, so I figured I’d at least do a little bit.

What I wanted to work on was squeezing the rivets between the trailing edge of the top skins and the rear spar. Initially I tried squeezing those with the wings in the cradle, but that was rather challenging. So I got Josie to come out and help me move the right wing to the workbench:

After a fair amount of squeezing, I had almost all the trailing edge rivets done:

The remaining rivets are on the inboard end, where the spar channel is reinforced by a doubler. Access there is going to be tight, so I’m going to do those another night. I might actually have to shoots those, especially the lat few inboard ones, where there are two doublers. There’s just precious little space to work here, and I don’t think even the thin-nose squeezer yoke will work here: (also, I need to clean my camera lens)

As planned, I went in and left work early today. Got home not too long after 5, changed, and went right to work on the wing cart. The tough part of this is that, since I was recycling the bases for the wing stands into the cart, once I started, I was committed to finishing this thing, unless I could find somewhere to lay the wings overnight.

First I unbolted/unclamped the wings from the stands, then got Josie to come out and help me carry them out of the garage. We just set them out in the grass while I worked:

Then there was a lot of unscrewing and unbolting to take the stands off the bases and get the bases apart. I managed to get it done before it got dark, and so I was able to cut the long 2x6s to final length in daylight instead of having to set up a work light or something. Then I assembled the lower channel of the cart; this was a modification of the “normal” cart design I made. Instead of having a single plank serve as the cart’s “backbone,” I used two 2x6s, with a 2×4 in between. The result was a U-shaped channel at the bottom of the cart. I also added two more 2x6s at the top running lengthwise. This creates a nice little pocket between the wings where I can store the bottom wing skins, and thusly solves a logistical and organizational problem.

I was going to add some diagonal braces for stability, but with just the channel and two more 2x6s, this thing is pretty much rock-solid:

With the bottom wing skins stored in the middle:

Then I rolled the beast out into the driveway and we loaded the wings into it. Perfect fit!

I quit at this point; it was almost 9 and I hadn’t even had dinner. I still need to clean up the garage from all this work and get things rearranged at some point. My next task on the wings will be squeezing all those remaining skin rivets, and then I can fit the flap brace and aileron gap fairing to each wing. I might be able to get the control surfaces done before the fuse kit arrives in a couple weeks; if not, it won’t be a huge deal.

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.

We jumped right into skin riveting after dinner tonight. Not really a lot to comment on, just more of the same stuff from the last couple of times. Only difference is that we got through the rest of the right skin tonight. I won’t quite say we’re “done” done, since I still want to go and check the shop heads. If the left skin is any indication, there will be a handful we’ll need to go back and hit up a touch more. But enough is enough for tonight.

Finished* right wing top skin:

I did make a slight boo-boo on one rivet. Guess I held the gun at a bit of an angle and put a little smiley face dent under the rivet. No worries though, it’ll disappear under the paint:

Unsurprisingly, the main task of the day was to keep going on skin riveting. Around early afternoon the left wing was all done:

Well, except for those clecos at the bottom. Those are the skin-spar rivets, and they’d be tough to get to in this position, but are accessible with the squeezer. So I figure I’ll just squeeze all of those after I get the wings off the stands and in the cradle.

The seam between the two skins doesn’t quite sit flush though. It occurred to me as I was clecoing these skins in place prior to riveting that maybe I should roll the edge of that top skin a bit. Some research indicated that other builders were about 50-50 on doing this, but the most important thing I learned is that you have to roll the edge before dimpling. So that particular ship had already sailed, nothing to do but shoot as-is and hope for the best.

It’s really not that bad, and I imagine it’ll disappear under paint:

Later in the evening, we got through about half of the rivets on the right inboard skin before deciding that it was time to call it a night. Amusingly, around this time we also noticed that Dude had laid down and gone to sleep out in the garage – while we were shooting rivets. Even though the Mutt Muffs block out sound, that’s still quite a racket to sleep through:

In other news, I took advantage of more good weather to do some wood-cutting to prepare for building the wing cart. We made a midday trip to Home Depot for supplies and material, and I should have everything I need now. I made the cutouts in one end of the cart for the leading edge to fit in, and cut some of the 2×4 and 2×6 braces that also go on those end pieces. That just leaves me needing to cut four 2x6s to length after I take apart the wing stands, and to make a few more corner braces from other wing stand scrap. I figure that with the days starting to get longer again, I can always bail out of work a little early one day this week so I can make the last cuts while it’s still daylight.