Renewed Faith

I have to be completely honest here. After the fiasco that was trying to rivet the horizontal stabilizer over the last two days, I was seriously beginning to doubt my ability to complete this project. However, today I am a changed man. I just finished riveting together the vertical stabilizer (VS) rear spar, and it went much better.

While trying to rivet the horizontal stabilizer rear spar and ribs, I had to drill out at least five or six rivets. The HS707 nose rib to skin rivets were particularly trying, and are as of right now still not complete. While drilling out one bad rivet on the nose rib, I completely slotted the hole in the rib. It's so bad that the rib will need to be replaced. My first replacement part, yeah!

I've been continuing work on the vertical stabilizer as a distraction from the HS woes, and also since I have come to the conclusion that I should not attempt to hand buck rivets by myself. I was able to pneumatically squeeze and\or back rivet all the rivets in the VS rear spar.

My mother's boss may be stopping by the factory tomorrow. I understand he's interested in building an RV-10. That may be a good opportunity to get some riveting done on the HS, and get him some exposure to the building process. Two birds, one stone, etc.