After Ron left I finished the remaining bulkhead and rear J-channel riveting, which I could easily do by myself. There was one spot that gave me trouble, which is the bottom aft hole on the F-711 bulkhead.
Check out the inside. It's tough to see, but the bolts/nuts holding the tailwheel spring mount in place get in the freakin' way of bucking those rivets. The rivets are actually underneath the J-channels. I'm sure if you've got an assortment of funky bucking bars this won't be a problem, but my basic three didn't cut it. So I was forced to remove the bolts temporarily.
Here you can see the right bolt has been removed, and the mirror shows the rivet having been set.
I replaced the nuts and bolts with fresh ones and re-torqued 'em.
That was that...I finished up the lower rivets on both the F-711 and F-712 bulkheads, leaving the top holes clecoed. You do that all along the sides since you need to peel the skin back slightly to get the longerons in place later (soon). Notice that I haven't riveted the rudder stops on yet. I'm trying to figure out the best way to do that. The aft rivets can be squeezed, but the forward rivets need to be shot, and the flush set is too big for the area. Going to ask around...
Alright...cranking right along. I moved on to the center fuselage and riveted the seat ribs to the aft half of the F-704 spar carrythrough bulkhead. I secured the bulkhead to the bench with some clamped and screwed 2x4 chunks. Good enough to hold this sucker in place. I used a long straight rivet set and just pushed each seat rib out of the way when shooting the five AN470AD4-4 rivets in each rib. No smiles, looks gorgeous.
Here's the front side, for what it's worth.
For some reason Van's calls out AN3-10A bolts for the top and bottom holes in each seat rib, attaching them to the bulkhead doubler. I guess Van's considers that most builders don't have the rivet sets to be able to set 3/16" rivets, but the nuts & bolts must add a little extra weight. Oh, well. I put the bolts in, torqued, and Torque Sealed them.
That's about it for today. I need to rest my back, which is still recovering from whatever I did to it a few weeks ago. Hopefully tomorrow I can make more progress on the center fuselage, and maybe get it ready for the skin to get riveted on. Thanks to Ron, I had a really productive day. And Jen was very grateful that she didn't have to touch the rivet gun today!