Fuselage - Forward Section
The goal today was to finish-up riveting the side skins and the F-772 bottom skin. That goal was a little optimistic.
I needed Patricia's help to do the rivets that I could not reach by myself. Unfortunately, things did not go as smoothly as I would have liked. First, I did not want her to have to get under the fuselage and buck all of those rivets, so I had her do the riveting. However, we had a lot of rivets that did not sit flush, and I had a hard time figuring out just what was wrong. May have just been that I was pushing too hard on the bucking bar, and when she tried to push harder, the fuselage tended to slide. I don't really know, but I ended-up having to drill out a few rivets and shoot while she bucked. The final result was that all of the rivets were acceptable, and things looked pretty good when we were done. It's good to have some help.
Unfortunately, I pooped-out pretty fast from crawling out from under the fuselage on every rivet, so we didn't finish everything today. We managed to finish-up the bottom rivets on the left side, AFT of the wing spar.
One thing that I did screw-up was the three rivets in the aft end of F-623 that needed to go through the attach strap that attaches F-623 to the AFT fuselage (sorry, no picture). All of my bucking bars were too big to get in there, so I decided to use MK-319-BS pop rivets, instead. Unfortunately, after doing the first two forward rivets, the attach strap fell off, when I removed the last cleco--oops! It turns out that MK-319-BS rivets are too short here, and I will need to use something else (see tomorrow, where I figured this out).
 | Cleco'd on F-772 for the last time. We are going to rivet it on this time, I promise. All we have left to do are the rivets on F-772 and the few rivets along the bottom of the fuse. |
 | We managed to get to all of the rivets on the left side, AFT of the wing spar. |