After thinking most of yesterday and last night I decided to try and drill out the angle from the buck tail side. My thinking is if it is too difficult to do without buggering up the hole then I can go the long route and drill off the aft deck. I figured if I could do it this way 11 rivets was a lot better than all the aft deck rivets. Well it was surprisingly easy to do. I first center punched each shop head and then drilled them with a #33 it is slightly smaller than the hole size. I drilled about as deep as the buck tail was tall. I then opened up the hole to #30 and used a punch to pop off the tails. Now I could see the center of the hole, so I again used the under sized #33 and drilled further into the rivets. When I thought I was through the angle I tried to push the rivet out with a punch but no go, so I drilled more but this time with a #40, I thought the small diameter hole would relieve the side pressure. Sure enough it did and the rivets would pop out before I could drill all the way through the rivet.
In one photo you can see the green line which is where the end of the angle should be and the blue line is where the angle on my QB kit was. So you can see why I might have had an edge distance issue with the AN-3 hole that would go there. I made the new angle and riveted it in with no problems, it helped that I have an extra deep yoke for my squeezer, with that I was able to squeeze all of the rivets. Since drilled out holes are never as nice as new ones I added one rivet to each end of the vertical face of the angle. There was lots of extra room here so I figure it is good insurance. I sure am glad that all went well now I can get down to the serious business of mounting my tail surfaces.
Blue line is where the bad angle ended, green line is where it should end
New one, fits much better, could be tighter but this will work great
Riveted in place, with some peace of mind rivets added on each end.
