DATE: 10-30-2024 TIME: 9:37 – 5:18 ~ 8:20 hours
If you are wondering how I can spend 8 hours working on assembly it’s because I enjoy the process and I have a very understanding wife 🙂
Yesterday I worked the day on my own. Today my trusty assistant EJ showed up to give me a hand. Everything gets done more quickly with an assistant but you can do most everything on your own if you have enough clamps. You will see, from time to time, that I clamp components to the bench to make it easier for me, particularly when I am riveting.
Snapshots in the slider are for steps 1 and 2, 4 & 5. Step 3 relates to making a special bucking bar. As I had purchased the bucking bar, I think from Cleveland, I had the bucking bar on hand and so used it. Nothing against MK-319-BS rivets, but the AN426 make for a nicer finish.
Step 8 is to rivet the E-1008 rib halves together with LP4-3 rivets. My hands are smaller than EJ’s so I riveted all of the rear rivets and let EJ rivet all of the forward rivets. Although I own a pneumatic riveter I purchased for assembling the Zenith 750 SD for some reason we decided it wasn’t suitable for assembling the ribs so did them by hand with a Stanley swivel headed manual riveter. The pneumatic would not have worked on the rear rivets for sure but maybe on the forward rivets.
There isn’t much to see here apart from a little contortion.
Page 13 starts with clecoing the front start assmebly to the E-1008 ribs and the E-1001 skins and then in step 2 to rivet the front spar to the E-1008 flanges. These are all LP4-3 rivets and again, we started the riveting with the hand riveter and then decided to try the pneumatic riveter to see if it would work. My concern was the 1/8th nose had been modified (countersunk) by Zenith for their riveting purposes so it rounds the head of the rivet but it seemed to work just fine. That said, I’ve ordered a new nose so any further riveting will be done with a flat nose.
Step 3 on Page 9-13 is to rivet the skins to the front spar with AN426 rivets while leaving the outboard rivets outboard of the last E-1008 and inboard of the inboard most rib to facilitate other rivets to the rear of the spar that would not otherwise be accessible.
Step 1 on page 9-14 is to rivet the root rib E-905 aft flange to the E-1007 spar using AN426 flush rivets and step 2 to rivet the gusset to the root rib. To do this you have to squeeze your hand under the skin. Smaller hands are more useful although you could also use the bucking bar specified in step 3 on page 9-12 as it provides a long reach. The important thing is to make sure you have the bucking bar properly placed and aligned before firing the rivet gun.
After that, you just close up the skins remembering to NOT rivet the skins where the hinges for the trim tab will be attached.
Steps 4, 5 and 6 of Page 9-14 are next, attaching the tip rib and counterbalance assembly to the outboard end of the elevator. It is also important to follow the order. I made the mistake of riveting the bottom skin before riveting the top skin and so accessing the front spar flanges to back all the rivets was a chore. I was able to do it with a small tungsten bucking bar through the lightening holes in the front spar, but it wasn’t easy. Still, I preferred doing that to using MS-319-BS rivets in the top skin where they are called for in the bottom skin.
