2.0 Hours -
So far, working on the empennage has been in no way frustrating. Tonight, was a different story. Everything started off fine as I assembled the HS front spar. This simply involved riveting the HS-710 and 714 splice angles to the HS-702 front spars. The most difficult part was to make sure I used the correct rivets in the correct holes…simple!
With my confidence up, I decided to tackle attaching the inboard ribs (HS-404 and HS-405) to the front spar. While this sounds simple and takes a grand total of 8 rivets to accomplish, it is complicated by the large amount of flanges that get in the way. Van’s says you can bend the ribs slightly for better access to the rivets. I don’t know what their definition of slightly is, but I bent them a bit out of the way and still couldn’t get to the rivets with my squeezer.
HS front spar inboard rib attachemtn.
No squeezer access, not a problem…I’ll buck them. Well, I still couldn’t get a good angle with my gun and bucking bar. I managed to bend the first rivet over after only a couple of hits from the gun. I drilled the rivet out and tried again with the same result. Once again, I drilled the rivet out and then took a step back to re-think things. Finally, I decided to bend the ribs outward even more. Eureka! With the rib flanges out of the way, I could fit my squeezer in and squeeze all 8 rivets.
HS front spar and inboard ribs assembled.
With the ribs attached, my next step is to start riveting on the skins. However, I still need to finish dimpling the skins and I decided that 8:30pm was too late to be banging on the c-frame with a hammer. I’m trying my best not to piss off my neighbors too much!
On top of needing to dimple the skins, I could feel my frustration level had peaked and knew that it would be best to quit while I was ahead. To lower my stress, I did a quick clean up of the airplane factory. After putting all my tools away, I attached my blow gun to my air hose and proceeded to “clean” my workbenches and garage floor by blowing all the crap off of them at 90 PSI. What can I say, the blow gun is great stress relief!
