HS - One out of two

This first rivet kicked a little sideways which also made one side of the flush head on skin sit proud a little bit which I wasn't happy with. I may have been able to improve how the rivet was sitting if I squashed a little more paying more attention to the angle of the bucking bar and rivet gun. That however, wasn't assured. 

So I drilled him out and set him again. Gotcha!

This rivet was in a difficult spot on the HS front spar. This should've been around a AN426AD3-4.5 rivet. By the time I'd messed it up a couple of times, I needed to try an Oops rivet (NAS426AD4). Even then, I'd damaged the flange enough that it wouldn't sit flush against the spar.

....and then the inevitable happened...

I decided at this point is was best to turn the lights off and walk away for now.

Hmmm, better drill that out...

Unfortunately, I'm getting better at drilling rivets out. It doesn't look too bad from this side, but I didn't take a photo of the shop-head so let's not focus on that shall we?

For the record, I thought I'd add a sequence of images showing the removal of a rivet set that didn't go quite according to plan.

1) For the simple reason I don't want to drill any section of the skin or structure of the plane, I need to make sure (as much as I can) that I'm drilling out only the rivet. That being the case, I find it best to start drilling in what you think is the centre of the rivet. For various reason (lighting; width of drill; angle of drill), sometimes I may not be able to know I'm not actually drilling in the centre of the rivet. Therefore, I drill for few short revolutions and check. Below is not quite in the middle but at this point it can be straightened.

2) Change the angle of the drill slightly so I'm drilling more towards the centre but being careful not to increase the angle too much or the drill bit may go skidding off down the skin.

3) Drill about 1-2mm into the rivet and break off the rim of the rivet head as below

4) At this stage, I would normally grab the other side of the rivet with a small pair of side-cutters and gently wiggle it free which works most of the time.

5) I can't recall why (at the time of writing this), but I've drilled right through the rivet which obviously makes it difficult to grab whatever's left. I'm assuming the shop head, was so damaged I couldn't get a grip on it which meant I was forced to push the remnants through with a punch.

Maybe there's a better way to do this, but I haven't seen it yet.

It's not all flutterbys and unicorns

Time to remove dodgy rivets in the Horizontal Stab.

The following images show the horizontal stabiliser skins mostly riveted to the spars and ribs. As help was a little scarce, I decided that as I could reach both sides at the same time if I stood above the HS when sitting in the stands, I'd give it a go with the bucking bar and rivet gun.

Most looked pretty good, but when the shop end of the rivet was analysed a little closer, they weren't very acceptable. As a result, I went through and inspected the shop head on the inside of the skins on all four sides and marked the rivets I needed to drill out and re-do.

Sorry - not a very exciting post, but it shows how many I had to drill out and re-do. Maybe I should've tried a bit harder to bribe a friend to come and help... 

Riveting the Aft Fuse bottom skin

I thought it was about time I turned the rear fuse up the right way for my first real impression of what it's going to look like.

Below I've started on the F-01418B-L & R main side spars which as they are thicker aluminium, took quite a bit more work to file down and remove all the burs. 

The following two images show the raw edges of the F-01418B-L & R Aft Fuse Longerons. I used a coarse metal file to get the edges basically straight and removing all the jagged edges.

It's difficult to see the changes, but you can just see the diagonal lines showing the direction of filing using the finer file...

and then after using the Scotchbrite pads..

Quite a few hours went into preparing these as I still had to debur all holes, Scotchbrite both sides, etch and finally prime both longerons. More of this a little later.

I think I was trying to get the difficult rivets in that sit under the ribs on the inside.

And here are some random shots of the lower deck riveted to the F-01407 & F01408 bulkheads.

Riveting GF Assistance

This one is a very special post as it's the first one where my gorgeous girlfriend decided she wanted to help squish some little alloy bits, or the more tekanogicly correct - set some rivets.

HERE SHE IS!!!

She's got very high standards........in boyfriends, ahh sorry, I mean ahhh, in riveting correctly.

She obviously knows she's going to be flying in this some day, so wanted every rivet to be bang on......so to speak.

She helped me put about half the rivets in...

and I chipped away at the rest.