Vertical Stabilizer Completed & 'Do over'

Vertical Stabilizer

Finished up the Vertical Stabilizer this evening.  Got to again work with some of the various riveting techniques, by far my favorite is using the squeezer but had to do back riveting as well as use the bucking bar.  Had some help doing the skin riveting which speed things up a bit. Before you knew it, I was done.  Gave it a quick wipe down with some Acetone and will be putting the completed part away for later use. One note: it's very important to follow the directions when riveting on the skin, otherwise you're likely to have to drill out some rivets to get to the middle sections.  They're very clear, did find one mistake where diagrams called out two different rivet types. However, it's a non-issue because by that time you have an idea of when to use what rivets.

Substructure complete, minus the bottom pieces.

Cleco'd up to sit for awhile and ensure good fit.

Part complete

Now onto the rudder.....

'Do Over'

Any project you know you're going to have some issues arise that require some extra work.  I guess on my first 'Do Over' there's some good and bad news... Bad news I made the mistake of not countersinking a set of holes deep enough, the good news is I have become adept at rivet removal. Back story is when I previously countersunk the holes a bit early in the build I was more or less blindly working through the steps.  I could have looked ahead and seen which rivets went in but I didn't.  So when I used a size 3 rivet to test the depth it was flush, however the holes needed to be machine countersunk for a size 4 rivet. So, basically it was too shallow and I really didn't notice it until I had slammed through them all. I guess a bit of a downside to using the pneumatic squeezer.

The image below shows a few of the holes I fixed.  The middle shows the proper countersink and the right is not deep enough.

It's not a 'huge' mistake as it will only cost me a few hours of time and about $2 for some additional rivets. I have already complete half the rivet do overs and it took about an hour to drill out, re-countersink, deburr and re-rivet 10 of them.  I'll wait till I receive to extra rivets to do the rest, and in the end I've changed my process a bit to mitigate the chances of something like this happening again.