January 13, 2006
Ellen took off for San Jose this morning to help her mom pack up her house. She's going to Finland (her mom, not her, although she wants to go to Finland too, but she's not going, at least not until her mom goes but she COULD go before her mom goes if she wanted to but she doesn't want to).
My buddy John came over tonight to help me "rivet". We were thinking of starting with some AN42Guiness-OnTap rivets, and then moving onto the AN47SCotch-5 rivets. Then we figured we'd finish off with some BSPQ-PassedOut-2 rivets. Instead, he helped me find a big problem...
See this? This says Left. It means it's supposed to go on the Left side of the airplane.
As you can plainly see, it's currently on the RIGHT side of the airplane. I got the left ribs in the left skin, but the spar assembly went in upside down. Does it matter? Hey, probably not...the whole thing's CNC accu-laser punched to 3 baggilionth's of an inch, or thereabouts. No one will know once I pull the blue plastic off. Except you, of course.
Another view of the same snafu.
Here's another problem I found. While I was blabering to John about how it's not a big deal since everything's gonna fit just fine anyway, and oh here are where the bolts go that hold the HS on, I realized I rivetted the 4 holes that hold the HS on. This will make it difficult to insert the bolts later on I'd imagine. I put John to work stabilizing the HS assembly while I drilled out those 4 rivets. The holes came out perfectly. This ONLY happened because these were later to be enlarged to 3/16 therefore a slight elongation was acceptable. Had I needed to rivet these again, they would look like footballs by now...