March 20 - April 9, 2024 This section involved lots of deburring and dimpling and priming! Once that was done, there is a lot of instant gratification from cleco’ing together the whole tail section, and seeing a fuselage starting to emerge. But, the gratification was quickly replaced by a lot of work, trying to shoe-horn the aft lower tail pieces all together. It probably took 5 or 6 iterations of assembling (with clecos) and then disassembling, each time tweaking metal edges with forming pliers to try to get everything to fit smoothly. During this test-fitting, I noticed that the tailwheel bracket had a hole for securing the tailwheel that seemed drilled at an odd angle, such that the bolt/nut wouldn’t be centered in the hold in the aft lower tail skin. I measured it as about 3.5 degrees off the vertical, and Van’s said the spec was 2.5 degrees. So, they sent me a new part. The new part also wasn’t perfect, measuring right at the 2.5 degree limit. My EAA tech counselor didn’t think it would be a problem, so it’s installed in the tail now. Most of the skin riveting went quickly, with Mary gunning and me holding the bucking bar. But, we skipped over probably 2 dozen rivets that were tricky, and came back to them later. Some of these had bulkhead flanges that were bent slightly inward, making it hard to hold a bucking bar and a tool to push the flange flat. (There is a trick involving rubber tubing over the rivet shop end, which I have used when squeezing rivets, but I didn’t think it would work with bucking. Turns out it does!). Other tricky rivets just had poor access, and I had to order a new smaller titanium bucking bar to get to them. I ended up with a few REALLY ugly rivets in the tail section, like the ones holding the rudder stops. A couple of them got beat up by the bucking bar while bucking adjacent rivets. I’d kind of like to re-do them, but they will be hard to remove, and I’m not sure why I would make them better the second time. Hopefully the DAR won’t object. My tech counselor scratched his head but said to leave them. Onward…

Time spent: 58hr