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[February 7, 2007]


After deburring, priming and dimpling the last who know how many weeks, I decided to take a break from it tonight and start installing the right leading edge. First I clecoed it to the spar and double checked the fit. Looks perfect.


The outboard-most rivets can be set with a squeezer. For some reason the picture shows a shadow indicating the flange not sitting flush with the spar -- definitely not the case, just a wierd photo effect. These rivets are hard to nail because you can't get the squeezer flush with the flange. While these aren't perfect or textbook, they are good enough.


The rest of the rivets are another story. No way to squeeze them. You could buck and shoot them, but you have basically no room to get a rivet set onto these rivets with the rib interference. The only purpose for these rivets are to keep the spar from bluckling. The way I see it, the chance of that is NIL, and there is a main rib set right next to each leading edge rib with the proper rivets in it. It doesn't say it in the instructions, but builders have been told by Van's to use LP4-3 blind rivets here. I did one better and used Cherry MSP-4? rivets. I bought a bunch of them from Spruce in the MSP-42, 43 and 44 sizes. They are very comperable to solid rivets. In fact, the MSP-4? rivets can withstand 525 pounds of tension each (tension is important here to keep the spar from buckling). Multiply that by 5 rivets and there is about 2500 lbs of force needed to bucking these ribs, not to mention what the AN470AD4-? rivets contribute on the other ribs already riveted.

Anyways, out of the 3 pop rivet tools I have, none of them could get in here to set them -- not even the one I ground down for the fuel tank z-brackets! Plan B was to set them from the inside.


It took a TON of hand strength, but I got the last two outboard ribs pop riveted. I can cheat on these because of I can get my hands in the lightening holes in the spar. The other ones are going to be a different story.

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Last Modified: August 13, 2023