Today was a long day that started with dimpling the right elevator skin. That DRDT is quite nice. Dimples very easily and all of them come out absolutely perfect and consistent. Then I riveted the stiffeners to right elevator skin to get some practice at back riveting. It is VERY easy to do. And it seems to go fairly quickly as well. I remember reading some of Dan's comments about the tape when back riveting. Well, using the special scotch tape -- "back riveting tape" -- from Avery, avoided some of his issues. I only used two pieces for the elevator, and just kept reusing it as I went down. It never tore, and it still had some sticky left by the end of each side. Simply set the rivets in the holes, tape them in place, turn the piece over, set the stiffener on them, and pound them with the back rivet set in the gun.
So, after that I got this idea in my head that I might be able to finish the rudder today. So I started by back riveting the stiffeners to the skins. Here is the left skin, the right looks pretty much the same.
After clecoing the skins on the skeleton, the first rivets were the skin to counterbalance skin rivets. But before that I rolled the edge of the overlaying skin to keep it nice and flush after it was riveted down. You can see the slight bend in the skin in this picture.
Here it is, ready for squeezing a bunch of rivets in. I went ahead and squeezed even thought my hands would probably be kinda sore by the end of it all. Really, it wasn't too bad. The 3/32" rivets squeeze pretty easily.
Here is my special modification of one of the bucking bars to fit into the thin space at the end of the rudder ribs.
Here it is with all the rivets set and the leading edge rolled and riveted. Now that was a real pain! By Van's instructions it looks like they suggest rolling the whole edge at once. That is quite difficult, and it was much easier to do just one portion at a time, starting with the top small piece, of course. I didn't figure that one out until the second side, though. :P All that's left is the trailing edge, and that's supposed to be a lot of fun, too.
