Sometimes you’re on and sometimes you can’t figure out why nothing you touch works or ends up as it should.  Tonight I attacked riveting the aft spar and seat rails.  I had bolted and torqued everything the previous evening as I was tired, and it took long enough with the large quantity of bolts on this spar.  On the forward spar, I used the DRDT2 with rivet dies to squeeze  most of the rivets, but had to buck all on the aft spar.  There are a lot of rivets that you have to get to with the offset head and it took quite a few terrible rivets for me to get in the grove again with all of my tools.

I also was mentally worn out from work and despite consulting the plans many times and noting one line of holes should be left un-riveted, I filled them with beautifully set rivets on the left side of the spar.  So I had to drill all of those out before moving on.

Now one would think you’d remember that on the right side, but not me.  Filled that line up with perfect examples of bucking rivets.  Awesome.  Drilled those out.  I also took some time to really closely inspect all of the other rivets and drilled quite a few out, as I wasn’t happy with them.  Taking my time and a deep breath, the second attempt on each one of those turned out vastly better than the first.  It’s one of those cases that I’m sure it’d be fine and the airplane would never notice a few imperfect rivets, but I haven’t taken a “that’s good enough” mentality yet and don’t want to start now.