Ha! Nothing like watching your 2 favorite teams play in the Rose Bowl and working on the plane at the same time!! And NFL Playoffs... and NASCAR... hee hee.
Anyway, while Ben stripped his newly-acquired engine of junk and accessories, I cleaned & primed my forward horizontal stabilizer spar (after buffing out that horrible score mark from the brake) and then pre-drilled two holes in each outboard end for the end rib rivets. We took half an hour set up the air compressor in its temporary location, and then I went to work riveting. It took a few head scratches from both of us to remember that you need 80 lbs on the regulator to squeeze 1/8" rivets, however after I screwed up 2 and drilled them out, we turned up the air and I finished what I could reach with the pneumatic squeezer. I drilled 2 more rivet holes in the upper row near the centerline of HS-308 to replace the single rivet shown on the plan. I guess Van had a one-piece front spar web at one point, because a single rivet between two butting sides of the spar web won't do much of anything. Those holes couldn't be reached with the pneumatic so the man came over and squeezed them by hand. The hand squeezer has a longer yoke.
Then I set up my two center nose ribs. First I set the stab skin on the jig table and set the center ribs in place between the spars, making sure they were parallel to the inside edge of the skin to get the proper angle. I fluted and filed one of them, tweaked the flange til it sat in line with its its center rib partner, and clamped it in place. I tweaked the flange of the other one, clamped it in place, then measured between the two forward ends. Exactly 8.5" as drawn on the plans. Yippee!
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