October 8, 2006

Well, today was they day we started to rivet the forward skin on. There were a few things that needed to be done though before Mike arrived. Clayton came by to help out with some of it. There seems to be so much to do!

There’s a whole slew of pictures that Clayton took of todays events, and when they arrive in my email, I’ll post them and write up more comments.

We attached the compass to the roll bar brace and threaded the wiring through. The way we got it to be centered on the brace was to wrap tape around it until we had a really snug fit. Then we match drilled it and Clayton tapped out the holes to #8-32. I’m a bit disappointed that the foam rubber that is sandwiched between the compass mount and the brace was stuck on wonky at the manufacturer, so the compass hangs a bit to the right. I need to find a way to fix this.

Mike showed up around 4pm, and we spent the next three hours riveting. It was quite painful squeezing in under the front of the fuselage. There’s not a lot of room with that centre console in there! It’s a good job I’m skinny!

Some of the rivets we decided it would be more ’efficient’ to use pulled rivets. All the ones hiding under the glareshield trim for example, will never be seen. Here I was caught in the act of sin with the rivet puller in hand. I tried to run away quickly, but Clayton has a fast camera!

Putting the brace on is fun let me tell you.

And getting the bolts and nuts on is even more fun! Maybe I shouldn’t have back riveted those little angle pieces on that connect to the panel in the middle. It would have been a lot easier here as the skin would have been more flexible.

Here’s a shot of Mike’s plane. Sitting in the sunshine. Nice.

My toy on the left and Clayton’s on the right. We should have got them all together!

Here we are doing the bucked rivets. This is even more fun than getting the nuts and bolts in the brace! It was good today, as Clayton took a ton of pictures of us doing some work!

That’s a lot of grimmacing there! Mike look’s like he’s chewing tobacco!

Getting close.

We prosealed the front of the skin to seal the firewall. Here, I’m cleaning of the stuff that squeezed out during the riveting process.

We managed to get a good 90% of it done today. Mike had to leave before sunset as his home strip has some pretty high trees at one end, and they’re impossible to see in the dark. Thanks for your help Mike! I hope you didn’t get in too much trouble with Jill.