Yesterday I went up to visit Jeff to help him do a little work on his canopy skin. I got some pointers on riveting, and worked the bucking bar for a little while. It was pretty cool to see what the future has in store for me. We put the plexiglass on and set it up to check it out, looks good to me, Jeff!
So today, after 6 hours of real work (on a Saturday, yuck!), I just had to play with the dimpler some more. I finished up the support table, and I deburred the last of the holes on one of the rudder skins and dimpled it. That was cool, but I had the VS skeleton finished up and dimpled the VS skin last time, so I wanted to finish something up finally! I clecoed it all together, cranked the air down to just under 40 psi, grabbed the wide bucking bar and went at it.
The instructions called for squeezing a bunch of the rivets around the edge, but the yoke didn't fit close enough up against the rear spar where the thick stiffener is. I did quite well with the rivet gun on the inner parts, so I set the squeezer down and kept going with the gun and bucking bar. I had to squeeze the front 4 rivets at the top, but everything else went together quite nicely with the gun. I probably would have been more likely to squeeze more if I had a pneumatic squeezer, but the gun will contribute less to my airplane-building induced carpal tunnel than the hand squeezer. An couple hours later, I had my first finished airplane part! Here I am posing with it...
