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Wing Spars #3 (Riveting Left Spar)

Posted by on January 10, 2014

wings

Total build time: 273 hours.

The primer is dry and it’s time to start the final assembly of the left main wing spar. Solid rivets!

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In the picture above you can see most of those angle components that I fabricated earlier. They really help make the root of the spar extremely strong.

For installing all of the flush rivets and most of the hard to access rivets, I used the Sonex hammer and bolt method. It’s hard grunt work, but it works. Here’s the lowdown:

1) Position the spar with the bucking bar underneath on a hard sturdy surface (an arbor plate on concrete works well.)

 

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2) Use the proper rivet for the hole. This is a flush rivet, and it will be pressed into a countersunk hole from the bottom side.

 

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3) Position the bucking bar under the rivet head.

 

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Get your $1.50 home depot polished bolt and 4lb sledge hammer ready.

 

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4) Position the bolt on the shop head of the rivet and bash it several times with your Big Ass Hammer.

 

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5) Admire your handywork.

 

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6) Check your rivet with a rivet gauge. Basically you want to make sure that the rivet head has been sufficiently pounded into submission, but not overly squashed. To do this, earlier I made precision rivet gauge with 2 holes in it.

The rivet should be sufficiently “squashed” so that it does NOT fit through the happy hole, like so:

 

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So far it’s a happy hole, it didn’t fit. However I also want to check that it wasn’t OVERLY squashed, so my gauge had another hole…

 

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Hooray! The hole fit inside the sad hole, meaning it wasn’t squashed too flat. A good rivet!

Here is a look at the other side of the flush rivet. Notice that the entire area around and including the flush rivet remains flat.

 

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More happy rivets:

 

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I did have my fair share of rivets that didn’t pass the happy test. These rivets had to be drilled out and replaced. Here are some sad rivets.

 

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After a lot of whacking with a hammer and a bit of help from an air hammer with rivet sets, the left spar is complete. Make no mistake, this is serious grunt work, 8 hours on your knees pounding with a huge hammer. I placed the completed spar next to my aft fuselage to give an idea of placement, although this placement is off by several feet and the wrong side of the plane.

 

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I did learn a small side benefit of the priming I did on the spar… the solid riveting involves a lot of knocking around, hammer swinging and whatnot. The primer made it very easy to tell where i might have marred or scratched areas of the spar so I could correct any issues before calling the job done.

 

 

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