Doublers Riveted

Today was the second attempt at dealing with the CherryMax^® rivets. This turned out to be not all so bad as yesterday. I started with riveting the 1202-T and -U angles to the U-section. This time I started the outer rivets from the belly side. As you can see, they were properly pulled this time.


Access with the manual riveter to the front rivet was easy but the aft one was a real challenge. I needed all the wiggle room I could get and had to cant the rivet stem when extending the riveter's arm to get a grip for the next pull.


A riveter with a much longer head would be desirable for this job. The rest of the job was quite uneventful and business as usual. Here's a shot from half time riveting the doublers to the right side skin.


And shortly thereafter the riveting part of the job was done.


With a coarse grinding wheel I beveled the edges of the landing gear attach brackets.


Here you see both finished brackets among some workbench clutter.


The next step is to match drill additional holes into the U-section for additional bolts to be added to hold the gear legs. This is a job where I will just get one try, hit or miss, so I decided to postpone that work to a day when I'm fresh.
So far I've spent 22.5 hours on the SB.