I decided to start my riveting session tonight with a nice big ding in the skin just to get it over with. Literally rivet #1 of course. My bucking bar was angled a little off and the edge of it made a nice 3/8" sharp gouge/ding in the side skin by the baggage bulkhead. It's nothing that can't be corrected when painting, but I'll email Van's to see what the threshold is for when a sharp crease of a ding needs to be dealt with so it doesn't cause a crack down the road. It'll either just be something to leave alone and smooth out during paint, or possible they'll say stop drill the ends of it and fill the holes with rivets.
Once I got my quota of mistakes out of the way, the rest of the riveting went pretty well. After my bucking bar ding, I switched over to back riveting, which gave me a lot more control with the awkward reaches over the side skin. I got most of the left side top stringer done back to the aft bulkheads and started on the bottom stringer. Now that I have the method down, the rest should go a bit quicker, as usual.
