February 15, 2019

Fixing left elevator rivet and bending left elevator skin

It was my day off, which turned into a nice long day in the shop getting lots of things done. The first task to tackle was fixing the bad rivet on the left elevator skin. I hadn't yet messed up any holes enough to require any oops rivets, but this was the first hole that would definitely need one.

Above: a normal dimpled #40 hole.
Below that: the enlarged mess made from three attempts at drilling out bad rivets.

I enlarged the hole to #30 with a reamer (it didn't need much since the hole was basically already at a size 30) and stuck in an oops rivet. It looked much better than the previous attempts.

It finally looks nice. These oops rivets are nice to have!

I put the skin into the bender and went to town.

Before...

...and after.

Somehow I managed to get the bend almost perfect on the first try. It still required a tiny bit of persuasion with the hand seamer, but getting things within spec was easy. Most likely because there's less metal to bend on the left elevator compared to the right one.