After a quick email exchange with Sonex tech support, I have learned that mandrels breaking off outside of the rivets is a common symptom of slightly-too-large holes. Since I drilled all my holes up to #30 and then dimpled them, the resulting hole ends up being a tiny bit larger than a normal #30 hole. So the lesson learned is for flush rivets, drill the holes up to #31 and then dimple them for a tighter fit!
So anyway, today I fixed all the messed up flush rivets that I pulled over the weekend, which was several of them. I found that on most of them I could tap the mandrel back into the body of the rivet with a small pin punch. On the mandrels that wouldn't budge I used a small sanding drum on my Dremel tool to (carefully) sand the mandrels down to flush with the rest of the surface. A couple rivets were hopeless so I just drilled them out and replaced them. This was a tedious process but now I know how I'll drill my holes for flush rivets in the future, plus I got fairly comfortable drilling rivets out without trashing the holes and I'm sure that skill will come in handy plenty of times in the future.
With that task complete, these stabilator structures are done!
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