HS Spar & Ribs... 5.5/58

My little problem hole...

First thing today was to rivet the hinge brackets onto the spar. Ben was out mowing the lawn at the new house today, so I was on my own. Set up the pneumatic squeezer, determined how many washers to put under each of the rivet sets, and gave it a shot. It squeezed the first rivet down pretty well, but not quite far enough. One more small washer, and poof. I only had one that I had to drill out. It laid over sideways for undetermined reasons... probably didn't help that the hole was a little oblong to begin with, because it was drilled before we came up with the awesome angle jig yesterday... So I drilled through the head, and that came off ok, but the rivet was really jammed in the bracket, so the subsequent hammer-punching stressed the web against the cleco in the other hole and puckered it. I had to smooth a piece of wood and hammer it back flat, then deburr the edge of the hole, re-prime, and then the bracket sat flat against the surface again. (Whew.)

After lunch, I prepped the HS stab ribs. Good God, I still can't get over how rough these parts are! Looks like whoever cut the parts out was either drunk, or having a really bad day with the band saw, or whatever the used to cut out the blanks. The belt sander worked really well for smoothing the flange edges straight. The ribs were filed, fluted, and bent square, then clamped & drilled to the spar. The plans say to rivet them in place, but I will wait til after the skins are drilled. I'm not planning on "blind drilling" the skins to the skeleton as Van suggests.... that would just be way too scary!