I was able to do a good amount of riveting before Tom got here, but there is still a TON to do. We got a bit of a late start do to the fact that Tom lost his cell phone on the way out here, and we needed to deal with that first. Once we got going, it was a bumpy start with too many rivets having to be drilled out and redone. I think we were both frustrated by the backwards steps, but we finally got in a rhythm and nearly completed all of the riveting before we needed to stop in order to avoid bothering the neighbors with the loud hammering noises.
There were several setbacks due to Safari issues and our own mistakes, but I will talk about that in a separate entry. The bottom line is that we needed to research a fix for repairing aluminum do to a small dent and a possible hole relocation. That took some time online after we shut down the shop and called it a night. I was frustrated by the setbacks, but Tom was very good about reassuring me that we would get through the issues. He experienced similar issues during his riveting job, so he wasn’t concerned.
I have to say that the majority of the side and back rivets were very difficult to reach and we had to be very creative in the bucking process. Tom even brought a custom bucking bar that he made to get into the hard to reach and see places. After a day of this, I was dreaming of riveting a nice accessible wing of an airplane!
