One Side Skin Ready

I didn't quite finish my secret task list that I had aimed to do tonight. This was possibly caused by all the other things I had to do before getting home quite late. All I could do was to relief the two side skins from their blue vinyl covering and rivet the nutplates in place on skin.


You can't see it in this picture but I deviated from the plans a bit. Van's asked for the nutplates to be installed with those pesky little pop rivets. As all the holes were easy to access for dimpling except for 3 (Van's says two would be hard to get at but I couldn't get to 3), I chose to use AN426AD3-3.5 rivets to install the nutplates and use the pop type only on those 3 holes where they were necessary. Once the pneumatic squeezer is set up for a certain rivet length I find it particularly easier and faster to use squeeze rivets than those little pop rivets.
On the second skin I only got as far as to put the nutplates in place with a cleco in one hole on each of them.

The final task of the day before closing shop was to hang up a motivational picture.


It shows a picture a fellow builder sent me. He obviously got ahead of me and also got a really low-cost engine solution installed, so he'll be flying very soon now. I hung this up to remind myself of the final goal and to keep the competition going... :-)

I hope to finish the nutplates tomorrow evening and maybe to hang both side skins back on the fuselage.