January 8, 2006
Today I started rivetting on the skins.
There were some scratches so I buffed them out with a little scotchbrite, cleaned with MEK and shot it with a little Zinc Chromate. I'm switching to Tempo self-etch Zinc Chromate (5606) rattle can instead of AKZO. Man, I am SICK of etching and washing and mixing and spraying and cleaning etc etc. For heaven's sake, it doesn't need to repel meteors...it just needs to lend a little corrosion protection. The Tempo Zinc Chromate is designed for underwater use. No, I'm not going to top coat, and YES I know you don't get full protection without topcoating. Do you plan on flying underwater in the ocean? Neither do I...this stuff will work fine and will save me GOBS of time.
I don't know why I take random pictures like this. Hey look, rivets!
Now THESE rivets where a pain in the butt. THere's no room to get your hand in there to drive these suckers. Noooooo problem. Here's how I did it...
I took this bucking bar, and put duct take on the top and sides.
Then I laid it in the spar channel flat like this. Ellen held the tail nice and firmly while I shot and bucked these two rivets. All I had to do to buck it was keep the bar in contact with the rivet and keep it from slamming into the skins. The spar channel acted as a guide and the duct tape kept the bar from marring the spar.
Woops, what have we here? Remember yesterday when I was assembling the front spar? I forgot to mention that I screwed up a couple of rivets and ended up elongating some holes. My tech counselor popped in for a look (thanks Scott!!) and suggested I just drill out to #19 and stick some of the BSPQ-5-4 blind rivets in there. So that's what I did. The extra little piece of aluminum you see on the flange is a shim. The 5-4 has a minimum grip of .125. The three sheets I was rivetting through came up a bit short (.105, or something like that) so I added this little shim. That gave me enough thickness that everything worked out OK. Some rattle can over it and call it a day.
A shot from the back, in case anyone cares.