29 Sep 08 Back riveting

I finally got back to spending a little time working. I’m not sure I’m disciplined enough to get this project humming along like some people do, but I’m not racing anyone for a first flight.

I spent an hour tonight back riveting the stiffeners to the rudder skins. Pretty easy to do. Just pop in the rivets from the flush side, cover with rivet tape (basically just a strip of thin plastic with adhesives on the edges) and shoot with a special back rivet gun head. The rivets are so short (-3) that they only take a few knocks at 30psi.

One thing that make this so easy is you don’t have to wait between actions. All the rivets get dropped in the holes at once, and then all the rivets get shot at once. It really slows you down when you have to switch actions every 5 seconds.

Here’s the first stiffener getting ready to go on the left rudder skin. The stiffener is the little gray piece on the right of the alclad sheet. The back-rivet head is in the rivet gun on the stool:

And a few minutes later, all set:

(Side note: Thanks to FIRST, the fuzzy logo in the background, I’m not sure I’d be building this plane if I hadn’t built all those robots)

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