There's one more item to work on before I can start riveting the tailcone, and that's the rib for attaching to the forward skin on the vertical stabilizer. The rib has eight nut plates that need to be dimpled and riveted on. The tiny #3 rivets were actually pretty easy to squeeze single-handed, as you can see:
Just push the handle down 16 times (twice per nutplate) and it's done.
The rib is cleco'd and riveted on top of the top skin near the back. It'll be used to attach the forward skin on the V-stab.
With that out of the way it was finally time to start riveting the rest of the tailcone skins together. It took a while using the manual pop-rivet gun. I tried to borrow a pneumatic pop-rivet gun from the guy at work to speed things up but Gawdl kept muttering something about me breaking it before he had a chance to do his project. He probably heard about me breaking Mike's tap handle. I dunno. It's like he doesn't trust me or something. So I used the manual one that came with all the other tools Mr. B loaned me. Rivet after rivet, row after row, hand muscles getting sorer and sorer until... I broke it. The wire spring that spreads the handles apart sheared from metal fatigue. Don't worry Mr. B; I picked up a new pop-rivet tool at Home Despot:
Which works very well. It really doesn't take that much longer compared to a pneumatic one. Three good squeezes and pop! The rivet is set. Actually takes me longer to get the rivet set up -- sometimes it just doesn't want to slip into the hole right away and needs a little poking, prodding and persuading with an awl. Here I'm finishing up the last few rivets:
Some of the rivets in the area where the front of the V-stab attaches are a bit hard to get to. You can see here about 1/4 inch gap between the rivet mandrel and the forward V-stab attach bracket -- not enough room to get the barrel of the rivet tool over the mandrel. So I did like before and used the little wedges we fabricated way back in step 1 to pop the mandrel off at an angle.
I counted up all the used leftover rivet mandrels before throwing 'em away as a way to gage progress. When the 12,500 rivets I bought are gone, the plane is done. Completing the tailcone required 1,148 rivets, give or take, and countless times moving clecos around. Still no Popeye arms though, darn it.
And that wraps up Section 10. I moved the tailcone out of the way to organize the shop area in anticipation of starting on the wings later this year (after tax returns are done - per the CFO's insistence. I think she's trying to motivate me to not wait until April 14th as usual). I think it looks good in the spot formally occupied by the Christmas tree that I finally took down last week. Reminds me of the newfangled artificial tree at the tree lot in A Charlie Brown Christmas that sounded like an old oil drum.
Yep. Just needs a little decoration is all.
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