November 20, 2006 (10-20 step 7): After looking
over the plans I decided I could probably get away with back-riveting
the F-1055 rudder stop skin stiffeners before assembling the tailcone.
Once it's together I'd have to buck these rivets so I wanted to do them
first and take advantage of the ability to back-rivet them. Much nicer
finish! After that I ran a #6 screw with Boelube through all the
nutplates for the cover plates and rudder cable fairings to cut them in.
(10-19 steps 3 & 5): Next
I riveted the F-1007 & F-1008 frame halves together. I'm going to
hold off on riveting any of the F-1006 bulkhead together since its not
attached until the tailcone gets attached to the fuselage. I haven't
primed it yet either. We'll just cleco it for now.
(10-20 step 1): Ahhh, this is
looking familiar! Now we start the process of putting this bad boy
back together! We plan to back rivet as much of the tailcone as
possible so I'm putting the clecoes in from the inside this time
(underneath the skin in the pic).
This is as far as I think I'm
going to go for now. All the bulkheads and frames are clecoed in,
including the lower rear skin.
While attaching the F-1011 bulkhead I noticed the rudder stop brace
attached to it ever-so-slightly touches one of the rivets on a nutplate
for the rudder fairing covers. Looks like I'll have to pull this
bulkhead back out and trim the stop brace down just a bit to provide
some clearance.
(10-20 step 2): Now the fun
part :-) I get to start riveting! I toyed with multiple ideas on how
to do this. The only thing I knew was I wanted to back rivet as much
as possible. Other than that, the options seemed to be endless! The
plans say to cleco basically the whole assembly back together (less the
top skins) prior to riveting, some say just attach one side skin, while
others don't attach either side skin. Well, for ease of access to the
bottom skin while providing some sort of rigidity during riveting I
originally thought of going the one skin route. However, after seeing
the assembly listing to one side that got me started thinking about
twisting... I'd hate to rivet a slight twist into this thing from the
get go! So then I started thinking the whole enchilada route! But I
REALLY didn't like the idea of having to roll that whole assembly over,
tape a few rivets in, roll it back, rivet, repeat, etc, etc. Then I
realized I was probably over-thinking this thing, and nothing was
getting done! So, I took some string, temporarily tied the bulkheads
and frames into place, and then took the skin back off. This
arrangement proved to be very managable and didn't suffer from being
assymetrically loaded (i.e. twisted). It was easy to roll it over and
tape rivets into place when needed. Now I just had to be careful and
make sure I was on the back-rivet plate prior to pulling the trigger!
Cool... the stiffeners on the belly skin are now permanantly installed!
Angela
came out and helped with the bulkheads in the rear. She shot, I
bucked. Once those were done I used the squeezer and set the
rivets in the aft-most bulkhead. Angela snapped this pic before
heading inside.
Angela
came back out and we tag-teamed the bulkhead & frame rivets around
the bend in the lower portion of the side skins. Here we found a
limitation in the swivel flush set. Since this is a curved
surface and only part of the rubber guard makes contact with the skin
I'm guessing that some of the buffering affect it affords is lost
allowing the face of the set to beat the skin slightly harder. So
we got that small dent in the skin around the rivet. We didn't
like this so we went the back rivet route instead. This was an
interesting feat trying to get the rivet being set to sit flat on the
plate... unfortunately we don't have any pictures, but basically I
would roll the tailcone until the rivet head was flat on the backing
plate and balance it there while Angela would rivet it. Quite
entertaining looking I'm sure. But it worked out well... again,
not the fastest thing in the world, but we like the results
better. Here you can see (barely) the difference between the
swivel set rivet (upper left) and the back riveted one (lower
right). It's more noticeable than the picture indicates.
(10-20 steps 4 & 5):
Next up was to rivet the bottom skin to the frames and
bulkheads. I back riveted all of these except for the F-1010
bulkhead rivets (my back rivet plate wouldn't fit between the side skin
overlaps) and the two rivets in the F-1007 frame that you can't get to
with a back rivet set due to the stiffeners. These were all
bucked with the swivel set. After that I began back riveting the
bottom edges of the side skins to the bottom skin. Only got about
30 of those rivets done before calling it a night. I'll continue
with those next time.
Here's what being in a hurry and out of practice can do for you. This
is the bottom most rivet attaching the bellcrank ribs to the F-1007
frame. These are AD4 universal head rivets… I still haven't gotten the
hang of bucking these. The upper two I used the squeezer on, the
bottom one proved to be too far away for our yoke to reach. So I
hastily brought out the offset universal head rivet set and rivet gun
& fired away... After the first shot, the set bounced off
producing the smiley you see here. So, I pressed harder the next
time. The F-1007 frame is relatively thin material so the frame web
around the rivet started bending. I had to hit it a few more times in
order to get an "acceptable" shop head on the rivet, but the web of the
frame shows it! Its not terrible by any means, but definitely not
perfect. If I had it to do over again, I'd think this one through a
bit more & take the time to try something else. Not having that
option though I think this one will fall under the "I think I'll leave
it because I'll probably do more damage if I try to do it over".
(10-21 step 4):
Next up was to squeeze the rivets attaching the side skins to the
longerons, but only the ones that fall under the aft deck. The
ramaining ones will be done when the top skins are attached. A
few of the holes under the aft deck don't get rivets at this time
because they will get the screws that attach the empennage fairing
(much later!) Just about all of these rivets were pretty
easy. The only exception were the ones that also attach the
F-1010 bulkhead. You can't get the squeezer on these so I had
Angela shoot them for me again.
(10-20 step 7):
Only thing left before attaching the top deck is to rivet the
rudder stop skin stiffeners to the rudder stop brace. I was
originally worried I wouldn't be able to get a squeezer on these
because it's pretty tight in there, but I was just able to as you can
see.
Next up I used the alodine pen to touch up some of the scratches in the primer we created.
(10-21 step 5): I finished up the night by clecoing the aft deck in place. Underneath the deck is the F-1010B spacer and at the rear is the F-1012D up elevator stop. I put some masking tape over the holes I won't be riveting in this step... better safe than sorry! These holes are where the stop doubler & the attachment bar support angle will go in the next couple of steps.
(10-21 step 5): I finished up the night by clecoing the aft deck in place. Underneath the deck is the F-1010B spacer and at the rear is the F-1012D up elevator stop. I put some masking tape over the holes I won't be riveting in this step... better safe than sorry! These holes are where the stop doubler & the attachment bar support angle will go in the next couple of steps.
(10-22 step 1): After
squeezing all of the aft deck to longeron rivets I could, I then
riveted the up elevator stop on using the squeezer. After that I
squeezed the 4 rivets holding the aft deck to the F-1010B spacer and
the F-1010 bulkhead… these were just barely reachable with the
4" yoke. Next up was to rivet the F-1011B stop/doubler but leave
the forward row of rivets open for now. The outer two rivets on
either side of the stop/doubler had to be bucked due to their close
proximity to the protruding horizontal stabilizer attachment bars.
(10-22 step 2):
The reason the holes on the front of the stop/doubler were left
open was to allow temporarily bolting the attachment bar support angle
to it. Once bolted in place I got to match drill the holes from
the horizontal stabilizer attachment bars to it. Once match
drilled they were opened up to #12 in preparation for AN3 bolts.
Now to their final size, I removed them, deburred and then swabbed the
inside of them with alodine. After that dried, I riveted it to
the deck. Again, the outer 2 rivets on either side needed to be
bucked. We then bucked the remianing 2 longeron rivets and then I
squeezed the three AD3 rivets attaching the aft deck to the F-1012 rear
bulkhead.
This pic points out the rivets we wound up having to buck.
(10-21 step 5): The
last thing I did for the night was to attach the F-1009 frame to the
aft deck. Belive it or not I was able to use the squeezer on all
of these rivets. The most outboard rivets proved to be pretty
tight, but with a little care it can be done.
After everything was properly torqued I used some acrylic paint I
picked up at the local hobby shop to mark the nuts. This will let me
know during our annual inpections if the nut has started backing off
the bolt. These are locknuts that have nylon inserts, so they
shouldn't come loose, but you never know. Anyway, this acrylic paint
left something to be desired... it was quite translucent, and required
a second coat just to get what you see in the pic. I think I'll pick
up a cheap bottle of nail polish and try that instead... having to wait
for your torque-stripe to dry so you can apply a second coat is for the
birds!
(10-23 step 2): Our plan was
to rivet the skin to the stiffeners without the sides of the topskin
clecoed down as you can see. This allowed access to the underside for
bucking without someone having to be inside the tailcone. This worked
out pretty well, and we did some of our quickest riveting to date!
We were only able to do part of the riveting tonight… we'll finish up
tomorrow night (hopefully), but we went ahead and clecoed the rest of
the top skin in place. You can see in the pic all the rivets we were
able to do with the "bucker" outside of the tailcone. In order to do
the remaining ones I'll wind up laying inside the tailcone to get to
them... those should be some fun pics ;-)
(10-23 step 2): So, in order to support the weight of my body without bending the j-stiffeners, frames and bottom skins I started looking for stuff to cram inside. Well, we had a bunch of left over pink-board insulation from when we insulated the garage door. I roughly measured out and cut some shapes to sit in the areas between the j-stiffeners, and once all those were in place I took the remaining pieces and just started piling them up until I ran out. After that I took some folded up towels to bring the level up to match the frames, and then threw a comforter over the whole setup to make'er comfortable ;-)
Angela's getting pretty good with the ole rivet gun… very efficient!
She lets me bark commands and think I'm in control, when in reality
since I can't see her she's probably mocking me with funny faces and
gestures… it's all good though, the job is getting done, we're having a
blast, I get to feel like I'm important, and Angela gets to make fun of
me :-)
Angela snapped this shot of me "in jail"… what a dork!
(10-24 step 3): There are a
few steps left on the tailcone. BUT, the only one we're doing now is
attaching the rear shoulder harness anchors. So, I climbed up inside
the tailcone again, installed the hardware, tightened & torqued
them, and then marked them with paint for inspection purposes later.
So here it is… As mentioned, we're putting off a few things, namely
installing the battery/bellcrank mount (until we finalize a
dual-battery modification), battery, master relay, and bellcrank (all
dependent upon the mod). So we are deeming the tailcone is done!
