Sunday, June 13, 2010

Spar Box assembled, Ribs to come





Today was assembly day. The fully primed Spar Box was put together and the first rivets were set. Among them the first CS4-4 and a large number of squeeze rivets and my arms can tell the story. EVerything went well except for the counterweight attach brackets. One side was perfect and for some reason the other one did not perfectly go on. After the first 3 rivets it seemed to shifted slightly out of alignment and I couldn't set the next rivets easily but had to make the choice to drill out what I had set so far and start again or to "match"-drill the holes and continue. I went for the latter and I am wondering if that got into more trouble than what it saved me. If the counterweight attach arm is not going to get through those brackets because of this misalignment then I will have to take all the rivets out and not just the few that I wanted to avoid drilling out. Oh-boy! Of course this premonition occurred to me after I had closed the shop and not while I was making the decision to keep on going by match drilling the holes.
I couldn't go to bed worrying about this little misalignment, so I went back to the shop and tried to get the arm in the brackets and it .... worked. Whew! One of the bolts drops in freely but the opposite one then needs a little fidgeting to seat but it does go in. So, what I'll do next is probably opening one of the holes in the arm a little bit further to let that bolt slide in freely. That should then end my worries about this little mishap and it will make sure that I'll be paying more attention to these details before squeezing another rivet ...
Besides the satisfying work of riveting, I had to manufacture the hinge stops by cutting 21/32 in. off of a 4" tube and make sure that I wouldn't file them too short as they only may be 1/32 longer but no tolerance on the shorter side was allowed. That was not so easy with the relatively soft aluminum the tube was made from. Anyway, it looks like I did a decent job with them and the truth will come out when the hinges are being installed.
The rest of the evening I spent with the mind-bogglingly boring work of deburring the edges and holes of the ribs which will soon be installed (well, after prepping and priming and washing, of course).

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