Vertical Stab Part II

Finished up the vertical stabilizer this afternoon! Don’t get distracted by that nice looking truck in the first pic. First thing was to rivet the rear spar assembly together. Took a couple rivets to figure out the squeezer but once I had that dialed in, this part went pretty quickly. Then I cleco’d the front spar and ribs back on to the skin and begin to rivet that assembly.

The dimple dies I was using were making slightly deeper dimples than I would have liked, so it was hard to get the rivets to set completely down in the dimple. I used a slightly more rounded rivet set to try and get the gun further into the dimple which helped slightly. I’ve experimented with a different set of dimple dies that are working much better that I’ll use moving forward. Everything still turned out okay though.

Once the main spar and center rib were riveted to the skin, I cleco’d the rear spar in place. I realized that I had already set rivets in the holes that connected to the center rib. Woops. Had to drill those out. Wasn’t the first and won’t be the last. Got everything put back together and squeezed most of the rest of the rivets to the skin. There were a couple that didn’t quite allow the squeezer to get a good angle so I opted to buck them instead which turned out fine.

I did leave the lower rib, forward of the forward spar unriveted in case I decide to do the fastback modification… Heavily leaning towards that as of now. If anyone has opinions on the fastback mod, I’d love to hear em!

On to the rudder now…