I riveted the vertical pieces (2 each side) of the center bulkheads to the center sections. I wasn't able to use the squeezer for many of these rivets, but I'm getting much more comfortable with the rivet gun now that I have the air pressures figured out for different rivet sizes. I couldn't finish this portion of the bulkhead though. There is a big piece of aluminum that fits as a spacer in between the fore and aft center sections. This piece ultimately gets bolted on once the wings are ready to be mounted, but it is held in place by two rivets until that time. These are incredibly long rivets (4-14), and it's one of the items that Van's missed in the kit. So until Van's sends them to me, I can't finish up this piece.
I'm trying to decide if I want to prep all of the skins and prime them right away. Normally I wouldn't prime until after all of the match drilling is done, but in a month or so the weather is going to make it a lot harder to prime all of these huge skins outside (and doing them in the garage always ends up covering everything else with primer dust). The downside to priming everything now is that it will inevitably get beat up when I'm assembling and drilling it all to final size, let alone deburring, trimming, etc. So there would be primer touch up to do regardless I think. There will of course be a ton of small pieces to prime besides the skins, but that's a lot more doable in the garage, and I can even just do those with rattle can primer if I need to. I'd rather not prime until everything is truly ready to go, but there are A LOT of skins, and I'd hate to hit a wall and not be able to build for a long time this winter just because I have to wait for a window to spray primer.
I started deburring all of the edges on the skins while I mulled over the decision. I think I will probably roll the dice and prime as much as I can this week while the weather is still nice. I'll cross my fingers that I don't scrape too much primer off when building everything.
