With the tailcone skin completed (as well as my Tech Counselor visit), I am ready to button things up and attach the rear deck and the top skins. I start by jumping in with my rivet gun and bucking bar, but for whatever reason, I’m not having the best of luck getting the rivets set well. Honestly I started drilling out almost ever other rivet (sometimes a few times for the same rivet!).
Decide to switch to the Squeezer and start getting better results. Not sure if I was just being sloppy, having issues with my rivet set, or something to do with the settings on my rivet gun.
Also quickly ran out of rivets. Maybe that wasn’t shocking due to the number of rivets I have been drilling out. I honestly think I’m my own worst critic and tend to drill a rivet out when I probably don’t absolutely need to, but that’s a whole other conversation. Luckily I had purchased a 1lb bag of -10 rivets and a rivet cutter so I could make the necessary smaller rivets as needed. That really came in handy vs being at a standstill until a shipment from Vans came in.
About halfway through you will also see me take out my laptop to search through the scanned copies of my packing list to located the appropriate bolts / washers / nuts. This is really helpful and something I’m glad I did on day 1. Having a clean scan of the inventory sheet that was made searchable in Adobe makes life much easier.
Once all the rivets are set, and the bolts installed, I cleco on the top skins and move it out of the way for now. Waiting for a weekend for some assistance to get the aft most skin riveted in. I haven’t cut the plywood floor for so I have something to rest on, but that may be a project for this weekend.