Got sick of cleaning and polishing the rust of my steel backrivet plate so I got this stainless steel one….nice!

Today I made the stiffeners for the replacement right rudder skin. It was pretty quick second time around.

Mark, cut on bandsaw, smooth cut line on sander and finish on the Scotchbrite wheel.

  I also dimpled the aft few holes in the left elevator root rib. On the right side I used pop rivet dimple dies and vice grips to dimple these hard to reach holes but wasn’t that happy with the resulting dimple. It was a bit shallow and slightly crooked. This time I drilled a #40 hole in the edge of my backrivet plate, countersink it and used the male dimple die in a spare squeezer set holder to make the dimple. A couple of whacks with the hammer and I got a nice result.

OK now I’m really starting to regret buying a cheap compressor. While backriveting today it lost pressure again and I spent the next few hours fixing it. Seemed like a jammed or dirty valve in one cylinder so I opened it up and cleaned and reassembled it.

 

 Still not pressure. Further investigation revealed a small gap in the cylinder head gasket between the high and low pressure sides. Tiny, but aparently enough to render that cylinder useless. No where was open to try and find a replacement so I patched it with some rubber from a rubber glove…..yes a glove…and tested it. It works!!

Then later on that day, I went back to the workshop to do some more building and guess what…the compressor wouldn’t start. Just a BAD noise coming from the motor. I think either the motor or capacitors are fried.

I’m ordering a new Hindin Marquip 16 tomorrow!!

Today I made a backrivet plate from an old piece of steel I had lying around. I sanded and polished up one side with the angle grinder. This will be used between two pieces of carpet as shown below for riveting the stiffeners onto the rudder and elevator skins.

I’m up to the point where I need to start cutting and trimming the rudder stiffeners and since this is just the first of many tasks where a bandsaw would be the best tool for the job, I went and bought one.

It’s not a super expensive one but it’s large enough for what i need and I also got a 14tpi 3mm blade for it which should cut aluminium like butter!

Removed the blue vinyl from the HS skins along the rivet lines. I want to prime these areas before riveting for added corrosion protection. Also, you are supposed to dimple without the vinyl.

I used a soldering gun and ran it along a steel ruler then peeled off the strps. I polished the tip of the iron so it wouldn’t scratch the skins. Worked well so thanks to whoever came up with this idea.

 

Cleco’d the VS skeleton together.

Built a support table for my DRDT-2 dimpler. This will support the large skins while dimpling all the holes for the flush rivets. I need to find some scraps of carpet to stick to the top surface so I don’t scratch the skins.