While Madeline was taking her morning nap, I snuck out to the garage and finished riveting the vertical stabilizer. I thought that all of the remaining rivets could be done with a squeezer. They can certainly be reached with a squeezer, but the placement of some of the rivets and hinge brackets in the rear spar prevented getting proper alignment. I ended up shooting and bucking probably a dozen rivets along the sides of the rear spar.
Here is an example of the bad access. The shop head of the lower rivet which is holding the skin to the rear spar actually extends behind the plane of the face of the shop head of the upper rivet which is holding the middle rudder hinge bracket to the rear spar. Fortunately, I have a small tungsten bucking bar with a tapered end which could tuck nicely back in this area.
I got started on the rudder stiffeners tonight. To save a little time, I marked them to length and ganged them up to rough cut them to size. The bandsaw is pretty loud, so that’s all I can do on these tonight.
