Top Skin is Coming On

I took the day off and after an early morning flight to check if some changes to the plane (adding a parachute and some plumbing) had left it in an airworthy condition (weekend is coming up and a flight to Bisbee is planned). It turned out to be in good shape and so I returned to the shop and took on the last major task of Section 10, which is to close the cone by putting the top skin on.
I was really enjoying clecoing and the skin was already nicely attached....



....when I noticed something disturbing in the far tail section. Let's see if you can guess what caught my attention:



Aha! Baconing or curling of the skin. This could indicate that the edge hasn't been broken enough to overcome the force of the rivet pulling it up (or the cleco in this case). I put in more clecos in the open holes to see if this would fix it but it turned out that you could still see it. It was OK beyond the 8th hole toward the front but really bad in the aft area.

I decided to not take any chances and took the skin off. Yeah, all the nice clecos had to come out again (not all of them I just did half of it and then had enough room to work) and fortunately I just had ordered another edge breaking tool from Avery that I thought looked more promising than the one I had bought there before (the one that is a pair of modified locking pliers). This is how it looks like:



Really simple and you can progressively increase (or decrease) the amount of roll you want to add to the edge while you're doing it. This is exactly what I needed as I wanted to progressively increase the roll while pulling towards the aft section.
I didn't bother to practice on scrap metal and went straight to it. I really did a very strong roll towards the end as I had seen the skin to not be anywhere near where it was supposed to be.

After clecoing the skin back on the same section looked like this:



and from the rear you can see how much roll I applied there at the aft section:





I like this tool. It's very easy to use and much safer to use without the chance to roll into the skin as the other one. The good news is that this little roller tool is even cheaper than anything I have seen for the job yet. I think it was about 15 bucks and comes with a pair of spare nylon wheels.

In case you want to know where you have to increase the standard roll that I had added to the whole length of the skin on both sides, I have a photo with a little blue L mark right in front of the cleco where I had to apply more edge roll towards the aft section.



Now I was ready to go, so I clecoed the whole skin on and after match drilling, taking off skin, deburring, vacuuming, putting skin back on and realizing that everything fit just fine without further trimming of the skin rest I noticed that I had forgotten to prepare the little shoe that has to get riveted onto the top skin which takes the base of the triangular nose cone that covers the forward attachment point of the vertical stabilizer. The part was done but I hadn't riveted the nut plates on yet. So I did this right away.



half way done.
Now, let's do another attention test. Let's see if you can find the error in the following photo that shows the shoe being ready for installation:



Hm, let's see.... it's not the shoe itself. Look closer at the spot where it's supposed to go.... Aha! It's all shiny! Now what could be wrong with that? Dang! I thought for a moment to not worry about it and violate my primer-at-least-on-all-mating-parts rule but then I quickly realized that I would know and I would always remember (and maybe worry) that I left out this spot.

Oh well, we're not in a hurry, are we? So I took off all the clecos this time and removed the skin and prepped and primed this little spot.



Looks much better and I also primed two more parts that will get used in the final steps that I hadn't done yet.
Now, back on with the skin, cleco everything and set the rivets to get the party started.



Looks, like we're finally good to go (I just really hope I didn't forget to do anything inside as now would be the time...., oh well).

Alright, let's do this!



If you don't believe me, watch the clock on the wall in the background! 45 minutes later half of the rivets were pulled and the engineer got pretty tired - but happy. I decided to call it quits for the day and let the rest of the rivets sit for tomorrow. After all, I had to use my left arm for setting the clecos the last time as the right arm seemed to have gotten much heavier during the afternoon...



Here's a look at the product.



and another one that shows you that I really don't have a lot of room to squeeze around that massive part of the airframe in this little shop. Did I mention that I have no clue where to store the finished piece yet???