2.0 Hours -
After another hour and a half of riveting, I managed to get the right aileron into a very nearly finished state with only 4 rivets and 5 bolts left to install.
Van’s instructions for the ailerons really do a good job of explaining the order that everything is riveted on the ailerons. First, the leading edge skin is riveted to the nose ribs on the top side only. Then, the aft ribs are riveted, again by squeezing, to the spar. The aft skin can also be riveted to the ribs at this point, but, once again, only on the top side. My squeezer wouldn’t fit between the rib flanges for the aft-most holes. So, rather than attempting an indirect back-rivet method now, I’m going to wait for a couple new bucking bars to arrive that I ordered from The Yard. With luck, one of these bars may fit in this narrow area and I’ll be able to buck these rivets directly. If the new bars don’t fit, I’ll go back to the indirect method, but I wasn’t too happy with that when I tried it on the empennage.
After riveting the top of the leading edge skin to the nose rib, the main ribs are riveted to the spar.
The top side is done.
Once the skins are riveted to the tops of the ribs and spar, the aileron is flipped over. On the bottom, the first thing completed is riveting the counterbalance pipe to the leading edge skin with pop-rivets. Overall, I was pretty happy with the way these rivets turned out. Since the dimples weren’t really full dimples, I was worried that the rivets would stand a bit too proud of the surface. In the end, there are one or two that I may tap a bit with a hammer to get one side of the rivet to conform to the leading edge better, but, overall, they turned out pretty good.
The counterbalance rivets turned out pretty good. There are a couple that I may tap with a hammer to flatten them even more.
After riveting the counterbalance pipe, the rest of the bottom side of the skin is riveted starting with the ribs. Once the skins are riveted to the bottom of the ribs, the only thing left is to rivet the bottom side of the spar with pop-rivets.
My occasion picture specifically for the FAA...Here, I'm pop-riveting the bottom side of the skins to the spar.
Once all the pop-rivets were set, the right aileron was essentially done. I still have 4 rivets that need to be set, but I’m waiting on new bucking bars for that (should arrive tomorrow), and I also need to install the aileron brackets. The instructions tell you to install the brackets at some point during the riveting process, but if you do this, you will no longer have access to some of the rivets that still need to be set. Therefore, you have to ignore Van’s when they say to install them and just leave them off until the very end.
Except for the aft-most rib rivets and bolting on the brackets, the right aileron is done!
With the right aileron out-of-the-way, I started up on the left, but only got as far as riveting the top of the skins to the ribs/spar. Everything else will wait for another day.
