Started Riveting Right Flap Hinge to Wing

Whoa. He’s back. Again. I know the updates have been few and far between, but please rest assured: I have not been working on the airplane without updating the site. I guess that’s not a good thing either…

I spent a few hours today cleaning out the garage and reorganizing a little.

Much better. (Sorry, you don’t get a “before” shot.)

Then, I decided to work on the airplane. Since I haven’t coordinate the cousin to come over and bang out some of these bottom skin rivets, I figured I could rivet the flap hinge up until it prevents me from bending back the skin.

It should be just a couple rivets.

I do need to trim the one side of the flap hinge, though.

You can just barely see that I made a mark on the hinge.

After removing the flap.

Here’s the trim line on the outboard side of the hinge.

This is pretty self-explanatory.

This one, too.

Oh yeah, I needed to smooth out the eyelet remnants where I had snipped them off to make a centrally-inserted set of hinge pins. See this post for more.

All smooth.

Looks pretty good on the outboard side.

Same on the inboard side.

Let’s get to riveting. The rivet callout here is an AN426AD3-4.

I love these yellow bins. Highly recommended for your project.

I didn’t really feel like getting out the rivet gun (and I can’t use my no-hole yoke because the eyelets get in the way), so I made it work with my economy squeezer.

An action shot!

After 8 perfect rivets, I couldn’t help but take a picture of some shop heads.

Look at how perfect that guy is!

0.5 hour. 8 rivets. Again. Not bad for not working on it in 2 months.

Prev | Next

Rate this:

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 3rd, 2012 at 5:23 pm and is filed under Wings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

One Response to Started Riveting Right Flap Hinge to Wing

stefan says:

November 8, 2012 at 3:35 am

Woo-hoo! Shop heads!!! Oh how I missed them. Indeed those are good ones.

Serious comment for a second: Lately, I find myself usually grabbing the economy squeezer for AD3 rivets. The Cleaveland Main Squeeze seems like such overkill for anything but the -4 rivets, and somehow there’s a better feel for the -3’s being set with the cheap riveter (probably related to the extra force it takes).

Oh also, my heavy-duty yoke doesn’t like to release rivet sets, whereas the econ yoke pops them out easily (sometimes too easily).

But I suppose if I had 10 squeezers, I’m sure I would use all 10, with a different set in each. Hmmm…..