Tonight I installed the roll bar on the fuselage. The bar fit surprisingly well, it just slipped on like a perfectly-fitting shoe. I did have some alignment challenges on the right side, but after some fiddling around and using alignment tools, I was able to get it all to work. I riveted everything except a few rivets where the brace joins the bulkhead. I’ll get those with the rivet gun tomorrow when it’s not so late at night.
All was well until the very last river. It was getting late and I was hurrying to get to bed, and made a bad call. I was setting the last cherrymax rivet that held my fix in place, and the rivet was slightly misaligned. For some reason I thought it would straighten out, and I set the rivet on an angle. Instead of being flush with the top of the rollbar, the manufactured head was at an angle, with one edge protruding up. If it wasn’t a cherrymax, I would certainly drill it out and replace, but that’s so hard to do with a cherrymax. I decided to leave as-is and will use some filler to smooth out the surface. Super frustrating mistake after everything had gone so well.
