Picking up from my rudder spar with doublers work of two days ago, I drilled and cleco fastened the 4 rear and 1 front ribs. After deburring and scuffing up the surfaces a bit, I sprayed some zinc phosphate on those surfaces to be riveted together.
After a few hours of drying, I reassembled the skeleton with cleco fasteners and fetched the A4 rivets. Within about 15 minutes I had the entire skeleton riveted.
I'm glad I spent the money on a pneumatic rivet gun and a compressor. I'm a big guy and figured I could build this bird the old fashioned way. Well, I tried one rivet with the hand riveter (my first), then tried the pneumatic riveter on the second and I haven't touched the hand riveter since except to put it back in its box!
I got my two steel 2" square tubes (8' long) via UPS yesterday. Very useful for propping up the work with cleco fasteners on it.
The zinc phosphate has a pretty strong chemical odor. It'll help when the work moves out to the garage, but for now it's an annoyance. I wish I could find a Cortec source that sold in batches under 5 gallons.
