10/28/2003
6 hours: Productive day today. First I started out riveting the new attach angle on my HS spar. After a few rivets I ended up cutting some -12 rivets to -9.5 since the -9s are a little undersize and especially so in drilled-out holes. That went well, now my spar is finally done.
Back to riveting the VS spar. I immediately clinched another one of the flush rivets, now I've got three to drill out. After a bit of online reading I determined that my problem was due to slightly oversize rivets. The -6s called for in the plans are a bit too long and backriveting just doesn't seem to be happy with that. So I cut these rivets down too (actually sanded them in the belt sander since I don't have a rivet cutter yet :), drilled out the bad ones and did the rest with shorter rivets. No problems at all.
Also, the hinges were too tight to hit with the backrivet set so I had to shoot them with the rivet gun and bucking bar. These are my first bucked rivets on the airplane and they came out perfect. That's a relief.
I squeezed the rest of the spar rivets; now the skeleton is ready to rivet and it can go in the skin.
