What started out as excitement ended up as frustration.
I had put rivets in the horizontal stabilizer where the nutplates that hold on the fairing go. So, I drilled them out. (No problem here... I've become an expert rivet driller outer.) I decided to use my new nut plate drill guide. I had picked it up at an aviation trade show. When I was at the fiberglass workshop, I was told how great they were. BEFORE using it, I put a nutplate up against the guide just to make sure I was using the correct side. Everything LOOKED fine. I drilled holes for all the nutplates and kept thinking how GREAT this was. It was so much quicker and easier than using nutplates as guides.
I countersunk the holes for the flush rivets and used screws to hold the nutplates in place. When I tried to put the first rivets in, I noticed they didn't quite fit. NONE OF THEM DID. The tool guided me to drill all the holes about 1/32 on an inch too far apart. AGH!! So, I had to redrill all the holes using the nutplates as guides and each of the holes was a bit too large. Everything worked in the end, but the rivets look like crap! Luckily they are not structural.
