I finished riveting the the attach angles to the front spar. I tried to get a squeezer on them, but just couldn't get it to fit. So this ended up being my first shot at bucking rivets. These universal head rivets are a little easier to buck than flat head just because of the cup of the manufactured head. It makes it easier to keep the rivet gun on the rivet.
Finished with the front spar, it was on to the rear spar. All of the rivets in the doubler could be squeezed. I think I'll go through a lot of tape on this project! It makes it a lot easier to protect the primed surfaces with the metal tool edges wrapped with tape of some sort. It's even common to use tape over the squeezer and rivet gun dies to keep them from marring the surface when riveting.
Next up was to rivet the hinge brackets to the rear spar.
With the left and right sides of spars connected, now was the time I'd been dreading - time to put the first rivets in the skin! Hard to believe the bulk of the plane is held together by rivets this small.
The left horizontal stab skin went back into the cradle that was used for initial assembly. The first rivets to put in were in the outboard and inboard nose ribs. Those were easy because they were reachable with the squeezer.
The nose rib in the middle of the skin was a nightmare. I'd heard that it was one of the more awful places to rivet, and that turned out to be true. The leading edge of the skin fits together so tightly that I couldn't get my hand in far enough to solidly hold the bucking bar. After 30 minutes of barely holding a bucking bar by finger tip and having rivets slip out because of the awkward angles, I finally go the nose rib done. I can't say that it's pretty in there, but the rivets are solid. I'll happily close it up so nobody every gets to see how mangled I made that section trying to make it work.
After I finished asking for forgiveness for the strong language thrown at the nose rib, I moved on to the front spar again. The next step was to rivet a couple of the main ribs to the spar in preparation for putting the subassembly into the skin.
Lastly, the whole front spar assembly was put back into the left skin and clecoed in place again. That means more nerve wracking "don't dent the skin, don't dent the skin, don't dent the skin" will be coming up soon.
