Friday, September 28, 2018

Windshield & Canopy Bows + Other Parts (2.5)

2.5 hours

Now I'm really jumping around, but a coworker lent me her rivet squeezer which I knew I'd need to set the solid rivets on the canopy bows.  The bows on the B-model are pretty nice machined parts that come in three pieces per bow.  Each joint uses two 3/16" solid flush rivets, which means these were the first solid rivets I had to do on the whole plane so far now that I think about it.  Anyway they'll be visible from the cockpit so I wanted to make sure they turned out nice.

The rivet hand-powered squeezer that I borrowed worked well, but I couldn't quite generate enough force with it to fully set the big 3/16" rivets.  It got them set far enough to hold the parts firmly together though, so I set them the rest of the way with a hammer and ground-down bolt like the method on the Sonex website.  The end result was pretty good!






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