Over the last couple of days I’ve been working on riveting the inboard ends of the elevators.
Mostly it has been fine, but a couple of rivets have been frustrating.
The left elevator has a flange on the aft end of the inboard rib. Access to the two rivets is tight, and I struggled to get both of the in. The plans say to use a flush rivet set on the universal rivet heads where access is tight. It’s hard to get a squeezer in there, so I ended up bucking them both. The bucking bar scruffier the tops of the adjacent rivets, which looks ugly, but is not really a problem. I’m going to replace these two rivets on the flange, but decided to move on for now, so I don’t waste too much time here.
Luckily the other rivets have all been much easier to access. The two rivets connecting the gusset and the spar were reachable with the squeezer, and came out great. As did the pop rivets for the trim tab brace.
Then it was on to the inboard rib top and bottom flanges, which went smoothly.
With that done on both elevators, I riveted the left elevator top skin to the forward spar. Here it is flipped over, with the top skin riveted, and the bottom skin ready for skin/spar riveting.
