April 20, 2020
After a few days of letting the 3M adhesive cure on the trailing edge of the rudder, it was finally time to put some rivets in and see how straight we could keep the edge. The angle aluminum took a little effort to remove since the squeeze out from the wedge had stuck it to the skin. After a bit of work with some scotch-brite pads on the skins, and using a drill bit and dental picks to clean out all the holes, we had the surface prepped to the point where all the rivets sat nice and flush in their new homes. We taped them all in place and got out the back rivet set to follow along with Van’s instructions.
We set every 10th rivet just a slightly and went back with 4 more passes setting all the in between rivets about half way – as the plans suggested. We then inspected the trailing edge and realized we didn’t like the direction it was going. There wasn’t much curve in it yet but it was starting to develop a bend, we didn’t really feel comfortable continuing either. Luckily our used tool-set came with a squeezer die that had already been ground to an angle down for this purpose. After a few trial runs, we ended up grinding the angle a little more on the squeezer die and then we were ready to roll.
We started in the middle and worked our way to the ends, squeezing every 3rd or 4th rivet. I don’t think we achieved the “acorn in a hole” look that everyone talks about, but what we did achieve was consistently set rivets that sit flush with the skin and almost zero warping in the trailing edge of the rudder.
It took a little while to get used to the pneumatic squeezer on this job because the fore/aft location of the rivet in the squeezer set was extremely important. Since it’s on an angle, the further in you moved the squeezer, the tighter the gap would be on the squeezer set. It wasn’t the same set it (the depth) and forget system like for normal rivets. It took a while to get them all correct, but overall I’m extremely happy with how the rudder came out.
Cheers,
-Kacy
(Total Build Time: 149.0 hrs)