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Stevens Web Site
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Date: 12-29-2007
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Number of Hours: 1.60
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Manual Reference:
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Brief Description: Started riveting belly ribs with proseal
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I finally got back on the project after a long hiatus. The Christmas holidays are mostly to blame. On top of that, for the past two days I have had a horrible cold that has knocked me flat. After being laid out all day, I finally decided to go into the basement for some work. I could mouth breathe and feel miserable in the shop just as well as upstairs.
The first thing I did was install my new music system. My three sons got together and bought me an ipod for Christmas. My wife got me an I-tunes docking system so that I can play my music in the shop. I spent several days converting my cd's (all 5 of them) to i-tunes, and then I bought another 30 hits from the 60's and the 70's. It is great to work in the shop with all of the classics playing (the Beatles, Jimmy Buffet, the Alman Brothers, the Monkees, etc.)
Of course, after a long layoff, I picked a tough assignment, riveting the belly ribs onto the belly skin. Normally, this would not be a big project. All you have to do is back rivet the ribs onto the skin. However, Van says that you should apply proseal to the rib/skin connection, to help keep oil and exhaust out of the cockpit and to damped the exhaust pulses that hammer this area. As we all remember from the fuel tanks, proseal is a real joy. It is sticky, unwieldy, and get all over everything. Well, the proseal itself was not that bad a deal. Proseal is just what it is, you just deal with it. The big problem, however, comes when the riveting does not go right. Drilling out rivets in proseal and working fast before the proseal sets is a real adventure. The ribs went on fine, and then I started riveting on the cross brace. The center 10 or so rivets did not set right and I could not figure out what was going on. I then set the outer rivets ok and went back to drill out the offending rivets. It was a real mess. It turns out that the problem was that the backrivet plate had some interference with the hinge riveted to the front of the crosspiece. After finally drilling out all
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The new I-Pod music system
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Belly ribs and crosspiece prosealed and riveted to the inside of the belly skin
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A nasty little stinker that will have to be drilled out and replaced later
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