1.0 Hours -
Initially, i went into the garage only to clean up a bit and get things ready for tackling the final HS assembly in another day or two. Of course, once I was in the garage, I had a one track mind. My fifteen minute clean-up turned into a 1 hour work session which only ended thanks to a minor injury. More on that later.
The first step in assembling the left HS is to cleco the HS-707 rib to the inside top of the skin. It is then riveted to the top. However, it was really tricky to get the bucking bar into place, while holding the rivet gun. This is another task that would be easier with another hand, but a little ingenuity and I got the job done. Granted, this wasn’t my best effort at riveting, but it will do. The shop heads are perfect. The factory heads weren’t bad, but I did ding the skin around one rivet.
The shop heads inside the skin look great. I'm not as happy with the outside.
I'm not too happy with these, but they were incredibly hard to get to.
After the top of HS-707 was riveted to the skin, I clamped the bottom of HS-707 to the skin and then clamped HS-706 and HS-708 in. With even less space to reach into the skin than when the top of HS-707 was riveted, I couldn’t figure out how to rivet this piece. The plans say that you can use pop rivets instead of solid rivets on the bottom. I knew that I would have to use pop rivets on at least the two forward most holes, so i decided to start there and make up my mind on the rest of the holes later. As I started to pull the first pop rivet with my pop rivet tool, I wasn’t paying attention to where my hands were. I squeezed the pop rivet tool one final time and, when the shank of the rivet snapped, the handles of the pop rivet tool smashed together with my left middle finger in between them. The edge of the handle went through my fingernail.
I was attacked by a pop rivet tool!
While it hurt like crazy and I’ll probably lose my fingernail, I’m fairly sure that I prevented any blood from getting on the horizontal stabilizer. Now, my blood and sweat has gone into the project, a few tears and the plane should be done!
