Tappin’ that…spar

Home Depot to the rescue!  With a spankin’ new 3/8-16 tap in hand, I tapped the tie downs on the left spar.

And then on to the first rivets!  How exciting.  I successfully riveted on the -T and -V angles on the left spar and moved onto finish-riveting the pre-attached angle.  After several of the latter, I realized that the rivets weren’t pulling the piece tight against the spar webbing.  So I punched out the rivet stems for drilling, which I’ll do in the morning.  Far better to drill a few rivets than to have the spar stiffeners only loosely attached…

See the Hints & Tips page for a picture of my rivet punch.  It’s a trick I picked up at a Zenith Zodiac builders class.  Because the pulled rivets have a steel stem, simply drilling them out can cause the drill bit to skip off the head and mar the surrounding work.  But if you grind down a cheap spring-loaded punch ($5 at HF) to fit the hole in the rivet, drilling out the rivet is easy.  Use the punch to take out the steel stem, then slowly use the drill to take the head off the rivet.  Done.  Guaranteed not to skip.