My son came over this morning to help me out. Naively, I thought that the wet rivet setting procedure would be fairly straight forward but it wasn’t so. We began setting the rivets on the top side of the left fuel tank but we soon realize that some of them were not lying perfectly flat into the dimpled hole. At first I thought that we had lost our ability to use the bucking bar and the rivet gun but we finally manage to quickly improve our work. At least it was our impression at that moment.
The issue was in fact related to the tendency of the rivets to stand proud on one side despite our efforts to “force” them to sit flat. Over time we improved the installation quality but it is only when we could touch the cleaned out rivet heads with our bare hands that we realized that it was not 100% satisfactory. Many (too many) were considered defective (both visually and to the touch) so I decided that some of them will need to be replaced. Oh dear…
