Today I managed to squeeze in half an hour after work and started riveting the horizontal stabilizer forward spar assembly.
Mostly smooth sailing until I had to use my ground down angled rivet nose to get the rivets close to the edge. I had another few stems break higher than normal and one was actually proud of the rivet head. They all seemed to seat correctly on the blind side though so I’m not sure if this is a problem. I also noticed that it can sometimes take a couple pulls of the rivet gun to break the stem whereas in the normal configuration it almost always breaks first time.
I’m wondering if the larger diameter hole of this nose piece is a problem and will probably see if I can get some extra nose pieces from Harbor Freight in the correct diameter to modify. The larger hole also seems to mar the rivet heads more although I have found even the unmodified nose presses a slight flat on the rivet head which I haven’t seen on other people’s photos. Still trying to get a feel for what the range of acceptability is here and I haven’t been able to turn up much concrete guidance on the web.
Time: 0.5 hours
