It's been a busy week so I haven't been able to get much work done until today! My C-130J training has gotten busy again, and I had my first two flights in an actual airplane this week (prior to that it had been all full-motion simulator training, which I got about 150 hours of)! Flying a real airplane again finally is great and the J is awesome!!!
Anyway, back to the Waiex. Today I put together and almost finished the LH stabilator internal structure.
I assembled the structure the same way as the RH side.
Before updrilling the holes to their final size, I drew some lines down the center of each rib and test fit the skin to make sure everything was going to line up reasonably well.
Everything looked pretty good, so I went ahead and updrilled, disassembled, deburred, and dimpled where it was required. This was my first time using the Sonex "Super Simple Dimple Die." It seems to work real well with my pneumatic rivet puller and about 40psi from the compressor.
I did have to modify one half of the die, in order to access the inside of the rib flanges. A few minutes on the bench grinder was all it took. The die only cost about $10 with shipping so no big deal!
With the dimpling complete, I riveted most of the structure together. I did run into some issues with a few of the flush rivets though. Some of the mandrels broke off above the face of the rivet, so I'll have to grind them down. A couple others ended up not quite setting flush with the surface of the part, so I will drill them out and redo them later. One mandrel even pulled all the way through the rivet and trashed my little ramp spacer, so I had to make a new spacer!
So I have a handful of rivets to do over later, but that's all the time I had for today. The LH structure is almost done!
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