Thanksgiving Day and I am thankful that Anita agreed to help me with the riveting of the tail section. We used a back riveting technique in which one person holds the big mushroom bar while the one inside sets the shop head of the rivet with a back rivet set. I was inside and Anita was on the outside. The riveting went fairly fast but we could only use the back rivet technique on the longeron rivets. The spring on the rivet gun interfered with the bulkhead tops so we used the flush rivet set and bucking bar for those. Anita picked up on the stuff very quickly; we had one hiccup early on but not bad. We worked from the tail end forward and stopped at the first bulkhead, it was time to go to Thanksgiving Dinner.
I was totally amazed when we returned from dinner, to hear Anita tell me she wanted to do more riveting. It is not that she was getting into it, she just wanted to get it done and wanted to minimize her time in the shop tomorrow. So we riveted up to the next bulkhead and called it a night, we are about 2 thirds done.
Mushroom bar used as the back stop for back riveting
