Today, I spent at least 5 hours on the riviting process for the upper fwd skin. I had 3 different visitors today and was happy to show off my work. One fella was from Florida and was told at FBO that I was building an 8. He was very nice and extremely polite. He has been building his 8 for the last 10 summers and claims to enjoy the project. I was impressed with his spirit to say the least.
I started off with just riviting the skin on again to make sure I could get all the clecos in. This skin is tight fit when you get to other side last row. But it went on so...
I removed my GPS and radio and EMS to avoid unnecessary shaking from rivit gun. I also removed all the screws from the front panel and from the rear acess door. By the way!!!!! The radio acees door I made acees from baggage compartment is WORTH every minute I spent fabricating it. DO IT! It has made this riviting so much easier. You need to either remove the front panel all the way or have really good acces thru the openings or you can do most of it from this acess pannel door.
I started riviting the left side fwd longeron. I didnt do the larger 1/8" rivits in the front corner yet as Im contemplating using cherry max there. I then moved to the bulkheads and rivited most of the panel flange other than about 3 on each side that are realy hard to get to cleanly. I also did about half of the other bulkhead just fwd of the baggage area. Im contemplating ordering chery max rivits for most of the longeron rivits. The ones in the gear tower are next to impossible to do with all the stuff I already have crammed in there. So I might as well do the entire row foir uniformity. The only problem is that its two different length required and They need to be purchased in groups of 100!. That about 65 dollars per 100.
Some of the rivits didnt sit so well in the dimple so I needed to take a CS cutter in microstop to fix them. Then, I spent time checking each and every rivit with a gauge after setting and then hitting again as necessary. I was just getting t
Panel bulkhead mostly rivited on
Interior shot from rear radio aceess panel
Shot from above down on to the baggage area bulkhead rivits
