Well, after approximately 6 months of completely neglecting the airplane, I finally completed another big assembly on the airplane. Here are the gory details.
Yesterday, Taylor and I got all the rib-to-skin rivets set, so today, we finished up the spar rivets and cleaned up a few badly set rivets. Here we are with the every-other method on the lower flap skin (spar) rivets.
Look! no clecos!
Then, we finished getting the two exterior ribs in place. I did make a stupid mistake here, though. The spar rivets are all AN426AD3-4 rivets, and I just continued with that size around the side to the ribs.
Those ribs are SUPPOSED to be AN426AD3-3.5 rivets, so when I went to squeeze the -4s, they all bent over and sheared.
Nastiness here.
Ahh!
After some mild curse words, some deep breathing, and FIVE drilled out rivets, we realized our mistake and got the correctly-sized rivets in there.
Shiny bottom!
I had Taylor shine up the skins. (By “shine” I really mean “remove all of Andrew’s fingerprints.”)
Shiny bottom skin!
Shiny top skin.
I forgot how much fun it is to finish a big assembly.
It’s a wing!
1.0 hour, counted as 1.5 man-hours. 78 rivets, 5 drilled out.
Andrew's RV-7 Build Log 