You’ll get the play on words here in just a minute – but know that I’m chuckling to myself because of my brilliant pun. Anne is rolling her eyes.
I am getting more and more comfortable with each minor process in the overall build (drilling, deburring, dimpling, riveting…). I started the night out by dimpling everything on the rudder that is required to get the skins attached. That took some time because I did not realize that the sets on my squeezer were slowly coming unscrewed (I have an adjustable throat type squeezer, which on the whole is extremely nice) and the depth was slowly shallowing up. I ended up going back over each hole and dimpling to the correct depth. Not a huge deal at all, just a waste of time. Bummer.
Once the dimpling was done, it was on to riveting the individual ribs of the rudder to each of the skins. This ended up being particularly fun because it was the first time I got to back rivet on the plane (now you see the pun don’t you? Clever?). The back riveting could not have gone any better. I was incredibly pleased.
I also got some help tonight from my riveting assistant. She did great and it certainly helped to grow her excitement about the whole process, not that she wasn’t already but anything you can do to make it feel more real is important.
Back riveted in. The dimpling took longer than the riveting by a reasonably significant amount!
Total time today = 2 hours
Total time empennage = 35.5 hours
Total time aircraft = 35.5. hours