RIVETING!
Even if it's those darn squeeze rivets ;-). So I riveted the flange that will support the vertical stabilizer to one of the formers and I only messed up twice by squeezing a rivet that wasn't properly set in the hole. Why this happened I couldn't figure out but it was an easy job to drill those out and try again.
Riveting the rest of the formers with pull rivets was a blast but it was then that I noticed that I had overlooked something in the previous steps when I was looking ahead and worked on the tail skid bracket.
I was wondering when I was supposed to tap the hole for the eventual installation of the tie down ring and reading ahead I couldn't seem to find it.
Well, that was because it was in the description of the notes I thought I had already processed. Just one short line in the figure was dedicated to tell me I was supposed to drill and tap the hole. No harm done by this oversight as the part wasn't mounted yet and so I had to figure out how to drill a 1" deep straight hole. I knew I wanted to use the drill press for this but the challenge was to find a reliable way of supporting the odd shaped bracket during this process. Unfortunately all my usual tools for a job like this didn't work out. Mainly because I had already done a lot of metal removal work on the bracket and so I couldn't find a way how to hold it in the vise. Well, we are builders and so we know how to improvise... This is what I came up with and believe it or not, it worked great!
The photo of the bracket that was supposed to show the nice threading turned out to be completely blurry, so you just have to believe me that it worked fine :-).
All that was left to do for the day was to remove more blue vinyl of the parts that I decided to prep and prime the following day.
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