We had a date this morning in the garage to rivet the top skin on the tail cone. Lucky that it was only in the seventies not the nineties so very good working conditions! I emptied our linen closet and all the guest beds of pillows and blankets to build a fort inside the airplane. This was needed to protect the bulkheads that are about three inches tall as well as the rudder cable bracket which sticks about six inches right in the middle of your back! All things considered, it was quite comfortable and worked very well.

I crawled inside and got the headlight, ear muffs, and bucking bar ready while Laura did the majority of the work from outside. I wrapped the bucking bar with duct tape which did a great job of protecting the new primer and preventing scratches. Laura has a great touch with the rivet gun and has very consistent trigger pulls which makes bucking rivets go very quickly. We breezed through the project in about two hours without having to drill out a single rivet. I did have one hole that had to have an oops rivet installed since it was drilled out too big.

I installed the nut plates for the fairing and bolted on the seat belt brackets and temporarily installed the completed battery tray. I plan to go back and mark all the bolts with paint that I’ve torqued with the new torque wrench, as a few bolts are not final set since they will have to come out in later steps.

This is as far as we go with the tail cone now, as I won’t be attaching the stabilizers until much later in the build for storage reasons. The tail cone will get tapped up to help keep bugs out and then hung from the ceiling in the garage to keep it safe and out of the way. Next project will be some fiberglass work on all the stabilizer and control surface tips.

About priming! Over the past few weeks of inactivity I’ve been rethinking the issue of priming and decided there is really no reason not to do it. It was either now or never for the tail cone (some would say too late) so I went ahead and started shaking up rattle cans. It took about fifteen minutes to drill out the few rivets that I had put in the top skin and remove it. Moving the cone outside, I was able to get in pretty much everywhere to put a light coat of primer on all exposed surfaces. I also sprayed the top skin interior, j channels, and a few odds and ends that will be bolted on.

No updates in a while, so this will be a big one.  I finished up the left side skin following the usual procedure of removing the film, scuffing and priming as needed, deburring, and dimpling.

My wife came out to help on this skin with her first attempts at riveting on the actual project.  I’m happy to say that women are just as good at building as they are at flying the first time!  She was a natural and after some practice, we got a good rhythm going.  She’s much more comfortable behind the gun, which works well as I can control the bucking bar and shop head of the rivets.

I moved on to the aft tail deck and got the structure all put together.  This really stiffened up the cone and I’m happy that I only had to drill out one rivet despite some really interesting poses to get the bucking bar inside the frame!

The systems side of me kicked in and I couldn’t resist holding out on putting my static ports in which had been sitting on the “accessory” shelf for a while now.  I drilled out the prepunched hole to accept the ports and marked for flush rivets.  What I didn’t do in my excitement was to create a doubler plate for the interior of the skin.  So, the end result will not be the final result.  I’m unhappy with the look and the lack of contact between the skin and back side of the port.  I plan on picking up a Safe Air static kit at Osh Kosh and will replace these later on.

The top skin interior proved to be a test of my patience with removing blue film.  I think it was too thinly applied and would not come off in pieces any bigger than a sliver.  I’ve heard of others having this issue but was fortunate up to this point in not coming across this incredible frustrating set back.  So a ten minute job turned into an hour and some sore fingernails.

Alas, it did come clean and I scuffed, primed, deburred, and dimpled as normal.  I set about riveting as much as I could solo and quickly found it’s not worth trying much without my beautiful assistant.  So, we are planning a riveting party (get it?) over the July 4th weekend.  I’ll be piling a bunch of blankets inside the frame and see how contorted I can get my body as she sits outside with the gun.

A couple of follow up notes, I fixed the buggered rivet in the right side skin/bulkhead/j channel with a larger rivet after the 1/8″ die came from ACS.  Worked like a charm and makes me feel better to sleep at night.  I also have a torque wrench coming for the AN hardware that is currently installed finger tight on the frame.  Finally, here is a picture of the greatest thing to save my wrist since sliced bread:  an electric deburr tool.  I ordered an extra deburring bit from Avery Tool and cut the hex side down a bit.  This spins slowly, which is perfect for hitting the holes without taking too much material off.