Sunday, August 22, 2010

When everything goes wrong ...

Puh, that last session in the shop was quite hard to take. Pretty much everything went wrong.
At first I wanted to continue on the trim servo assembly and crimp the connectors onto the wires. The day before I had stopped by Harbor Freight and grabbed crimping pliers as I have always preferred to solder instead of crimping, so I didn't have any yet.
The tool looked cheap, was cheap and turned out to be completely wasted money. The pliers are so flimsy they didn't even put a dent in the barrel of the connectors. I am now waiting for real pliers to arrive from SteinAir.
Well, with this operation stalled, I moved on to put together the actuator arm for the trim tabs or ASTs. This one worked pretty well until I hit the part were I was supposed to rivet in two AD3-9 rivets. These are pretty long and I hadn't dealt with any rivets that long yet. I thought it was an easy job as I had just purchased this new pneumatic squeezer.
That did not turn out well at all though. The problem was that the squeezer's piston had hardly moved when it already engaged the rivet and at that wide open angle the piston does not develop enough force to compress the rivet.
So I took off the yoke and put it on the manual squeezer. Now, I expected a quick job and - yuk - failed again!
This time the yoke wouldn't open up enough to even get the rivet in between the dies! I had to take out the backstop of the movable arm of the squeezer to trick it to say "Ahhhh" a bit better and get that rivet in between. My anger at that point was quite high and you can tell by the so-so squeezing job I did on them. I think it'll be alright as they are not really structural and only have to hold the threaded insert in the tube.
And finally when pulling the AD42H rivets on the tube brackets, I didn't push hard enough on one of them and the head didn't have full contact with the bracket surface. Argh! ;-) Fortunately, one of my ancestors must have been a smith as I was able to artistically apply the force of a light hammer in a way to convince the rivet head to make a full contact.
Whew! I think none of the sections has given me so much headache so far. I wonder if it's me or just bad luck.
Here's the end result of a few hours of cursing and cussing:

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