26-14: Riveting Lower Skin to Seat Ribs

Page 26-14 was a fairly simple one - to rivet the seat ribs to the lower skins. There were also 5 rivets on the forward spar flange which were riveted. As always, i do an inspection and make a plan for how to get to the various rivets - there were a few rivets which were going to be hard!

The first one was in the outboard corners of the gear brace assembly - thankfully, these were already called out as being MK-319-BS (for obvious reasons). The inboard ones however, were called out to be solid rivets. I saw no way that these would end up nice - so elected to go with MK-319-BS rivets here too. What's a couple of pulled rivets between friends?

These were the locations of the rivets under the gear brace. 

Thank you Van's - these would have been hard. These are the outboard rivets shown above. 

These are the onboard ones - i really didn't think i had much hope of getting these. 

The other 4 trouble rivets, were very close to the webs of the 'inboard seat ribs' - the ones with the wiring angles riveted to them. 2 were on the flange of the forward bulkhead, and 2 were on the flange of the aft bulkhead. In the end, we used the gun and the bar to set these - dad was on the gun, and i used the angled face of my tungsten bucking bar. Worked fine in the end - they weren't too much trouble. 

These were the other 4 difficult rivet locations. 

These are the 2 on the lower flange of the forward bulkhead...

..and these are the 2 on the lower flange of the aft bulkhead. 

Other than these rivets, all others were backriveted, with dad using our homemade backrivet bar on the outside skin and myself on the long, offset backrivet set. 

All polished up and ready to roll

I clamped the assembly very well to the bench so it didn't move to much when riveting

Cleco free since 2022 (That's Dad in the skin reflection). 

The only other small task was to rivet the inboard gear brace angles to the seat ribs. The outboard ones must get riveted later - but i didn't read ahead to find out where. After this was done, we setup the workbench extensions which i had previously used for the wing spars, on a couple of stands. This will allow a lower riveting height for the next steps. 

The rivets didn't fit very well in the lower 2 holes, so i reamed using the 90 degree angle drill and collet. 

Next up, the step attach assembly and baggage ribs.