DATE: 10-09-2024 TIME: 2:00
I had to give up on completing the rudder this morning because I am waiting for a couple of replacement rivets that, hopefully, will be here by Saturday.
So I went back to re-assembling the horizontal stabilizer after disassembly and priming all of the components.
The manual says, after drilling and countersinking the HS-1002 front spar doubler plate (HS-1007), left and right spar caps and fabricating the HS-1008 left and right brackets, to prime and rivet those components back onto the spar. This is on page 8-5.
I opted to not do that because of the setup and cleanup time for priming. Instead, I continued on with the preparation through page 8-11 after just re-attaching the page 8-5 parts with clecos. Also, I found that 200 silver clecos is not enough to put a cleco in every hole of the skins. The manual recommends 350 silver clecos. Even that isn’t enough and while it probably isn’t necessary to have a cleco in every hole, as I had to order more anyway I just bought another 200 so when final drilling everything I had 400 clecos into the assembly. I figured everything was nicely lined up.
So today, after putting the rudder aside I started by doing the riveting called for on page 8-6. I was thinking about using a rivet squeezer and did on one of the spar-spar cap flange AN470 rivets but it was too slow and did not provide a better set anyway so I went back to the 3x rivet gun and a bucking bar.
