Today, while waiting for the DirecTV guy to show up (insert long story here about how I took the whole afternoon off to cover his time (12-4pm) and then he didn’t show up until 5:30pm), I ended up taking some time out for the airplane.
Taylor and I riveted six rivets on the inboard edge the last time he was over. It turns out, I really needed to bend the forward edge of the skin “up” in the picture to reach the aft row of rivets.
So, I drilled out three of the rivets, and was able to reach in from just below the main spar (bottom of these pictures) to buck the top row of rivets.
After setting the top (aft? oh man, we’re going to have trouble communicating with our different frames of reference) row of rivets, I worked down one rivet at a time for the two middle wing-walk ribs. (The inboard or left rib can be squeezed at the end, and the outboard wing-walk rib can be bucked by reaching from outboard after the wingwalk ribs are done.
Here’s the top row riveted.
To help me know where I was, I colored each rivet black with a magic marker after setting it.
After an hour, I made it about halfway down the rib.
From here on, I won’t be able to peel the skin back from the bottom anymore, but I should be able to reach in through the inboard rib, where the lightening holes are now big enough for my huge biceps.
1.0 hour, 33 rivets. 3 (originally perfect) rivets drilled out due to lack of planning. Boo.
Andrew's RV-7 Build Log 