Vertical Stabilizer

Today went a bit slower than I expected it to.  I was all thumbs with riveting, so it felt like for every 1 rivet I put in, I drilled one out.  I'm not sure why it was such a bear.  The locations of the rivets were definitely tight quarters, but nothing much worse than when I skinned the horizontal stab.  Just one of those days I guess.

Things started out easy enough - cleco and rivet the spar doubler and hinge brackets to the rear spar.  The vast majority of these rivets could be done with the squeezer, which is quickly becoming one of my favorite tools.  Not wanting to repeat one of my earlier mistakes that I made on the horizontal stab by putting in rivets earlier than they should, I followed the suggestion in the manual and taped over the handful of holes that would later be used to rivet the ribs to the rear spar.

There are areas of the rear spar that will need to be a flat surface once attached to the fuselage, so the lower portion of the spar and doubler uses countersunk flush rivets as opposed to the universal head rivets used for the rest of the spar.

To get ready for skinning the VS, the ribs were riveted to the front spar to make the skeleton for the skin.

This is where you get a little deja vu.  In order to line everything up and be ready for riveting, the skin has to be clecoed onto the skeleton again, just like it was to get match drilled prior to priming.  This is where good music or a podcast is necessary, since it gets pretty repetitive and mind numbing to cleco, then rivet, then move clecos, continue riveting, move more clecos, rivet, etc.

For whatever reason, the front spar is where I really struggled with riveting.  I just couldn't get the bucking bar held correctly because of the position inside the skin, so a decent number of rivets had to be redone because I didn't get them set to my satisfaction.  The saving grace is that it takes a pretty significantly screwed up rivet to be problematic in reality (based on what the specs in the aircraft maintenance bible say), so while some of my rivet heads won't go in the photo album, they're doing their job.

The tip of the upper rib was a bit of a head scratcher to rivet.  My squeezer wouldn't fit inside the narrow space, and I didn't have a proper bucking bar that would fit either.  I ultimately had to grab a chunk of scrap steel (probably 3/8" or so) I had laying around, clean it up a little bit, then slowly use it to buck the last rivet in the nose.  This was far from ideal because what you need in a bucking bar is mass, but little by little I got the rivets set ok.

And there you have it!  One vertical stabilizer all done.  I did have a couple of minor dings on the skin while riveting tonight.  They're probably unnoticeable to most people, but I know they're there.  A small dab of bondo to fill the slight concavity come paint time will do wonders.