I squeezed all of the rivets on the horizontal stabilizer rear spar with a pneumatic squeezer. Ignore the hand squeezer there. That was just to coax some of the more snug rivet’s manufactured heads tight against the spar before squeezing. I was really surprised how easy it is to get the holes not to line up with match drilled parts. The clecos definitely don’t align the holes perfectly, and if you get off a bit, it’s really hard to get the rivets in. What worked a bit better for me was to put every other rivet in place (with no clecos in the part), then cleco between them. Everything lined up quite nicely when I did this.
Here is the front spar riveted together with the HS-405 ribs.
I was planning to deviate from the plans and not rivet HS-404 (the inner nose ribs) on at this point so that I could get solid rivets on the bottom of HS-707 (the nose ribs at about mid-span on each side), but looking ahead, I see that Van’s changed their building instructions and have you rivet the upper and lower sides of HS-707 before attaching the skin to the front spar, so I’m going to go ahead and attach HS-404 now. This picture shows the two holes in HS-404 where HS-405 will attach
With the spars prepped, I deburred and began dimpling the holes in the skin. I’m really glad I got this DRDT-2 dimpler. It lets you dimple completely quietly. Many builders opt for the cheaper c-frame dimpling tool, but with two young kids in the house who go to bed early, that would seriously slow down construction since it’s quite loud and most of the time I spend on this project is after 10 pm.
