DATE: 08/18/2024 – TIME: 2:10
I spent a couple of hours this afternoon closing up the vertical stabilizer in the order specified in the Vans RV-10 manual. I had some help this past week as I started the process but finished up with the 1007 front spar and in-ribs on my own. I was quite nervous about doing this on my own but I am happy with the result although I would definitely recommend having someone else hold the bucking bar if you can.
I did not find it too much of a problem. Definitely using the tungsten bucking bar worked great and the swivel mushroom set was a real benefit or I am sure I would have had a lot of smilies on the skin.
In the end, I decided to drill out one of the rivets that was significantly over driven and, because I had noted that earlier I had to go back and drive a number of the rivets because they were not driven enough.
My process was to put a significant amount of weight onto the rivet gun to make sure the skin was in close contact with the rib flanges. This worked well but did result in some scuffing of the skin which, for me, isn’t an issue as I plan to paint.
Below are some snapshots of the final rivets before closing the skin completely. I will augment this with some additional snapshots taken by the surveillance cameras asn backfill with some additional posts from earlier in the week. Monday this past week was taken up with creating my temporary “paint booth”.
I think all these pictures are “final” but I may have done some additional tweaking on the rivets after these images were shot (although I was fairly careful to delete pre “final decision” and closing).
I am going to reduce the amount of video I am making available here as it requires a lot of storage space on the server but I do want to have enough available to provide a reasonable amount of information as to my process.