Nov 10 & 11, 2001  2 hours

This was a beautiful weekend.  To nice to spend totally in the basement.  A friend from church operates a large farm and I slip out of the house and help him on the weekends during harvest.  I get the chance to run a 300 hp John Deere 4wd tractor so I elected to spend Saturday outside. 

I did spend about 30 minutes and riveted the front spar to the ribs.

Sunday night I spent about an hour and half drilling the skin to the ribs. Here is the final side of the skin drilled and clecoed to the ribs and spars. 

Nov 12, 2001 2.5 hours

I dismantled the skin from the VS skeleton and begin the  process of deburring all the holes that I had drilled.  I then dimpled all the holes both in the skin and in the ribs. 

The skin was then re-attached to the skeleton. Here's the skin clecoed back to the skeleton.  I riveted 4 or 5 rivets before stopping for the night. 

Nov 13, 2001  3.5 hours

Riveted the skin on the VS tonight.  Not many pictures with this. I used the air hammer and bucking bar for the forward spar and middle rib and the squeezer for the outside edges.  Here's a picture of the inside of one side of the skin riveted.

Now just to finish the outside rows with the squeezer.  

Guess what's on the backside of this bolt.  You're right.  The nut on the backside.  I had just finished closing out the skin to forward spar when I realized I'd left the nut on.  I knew that the nut wasn't tight as I'd started to take it off earlier and started doing something else before finishing.  I really was afraid that I'd created a mess.  Fortunately, the nut did come off and I was able to tilt the VS and get the nut out from the other end without having to drill out the rivets.  Lucky this time!  

Completed the riveting.   I had to look and see what it looked like.