December 31, 2004 - Left Wing
Aileron Control Rod - Short

First I had to cut the supplied epoxied steel pipe to size with my trusty hack saw.  It's time like these when I wish I had invested in a band saw.  But I really don't have the space for one and the overall time savings would probably only be an hour or two.
Drilling the steel rod along with the rod end.  It makes riveting much easier if the hole is perfectly centered on the rod. 

After drilling and deburring, it was time to rivet the rod ends in the tube.  Piece of cake, right?  Negative, ghostrider.  Right away I ran into trouble.  As usual, I got better at it as I went along.  Initially I tried squeezing the 4-12 rivet as called for in the plans, although it seemed a little long.  I used my Main Squeeze hand squeezer.  On my first rivet, the shop head buckled.  So I went upstairs to the computer to see what the internet RV community had to say.  Dan C just said he squeezed them with no problem.  But others had had the same problems as me.   One guy used the rivet gun and sort of backriveted them.  A couple suggested using 4-11 rivets.  One guy pointed out that it wasn’t a big deal drilling them out because you don’t get the widening hole problem with the steel pipe like you do with aluminum.  Another guy said just squeeze very slowly.

So I tried the rivet gun and the back rivet plate on a second rivet and that did nothing but scar the steel pipe and mangle the rivet head.  I drilled out both rivets.  The one guy was right, they drill out easy with no expansion of the tube hole.  I decided to try the Main Squeeze again but with 4-11 rivets.  I squeezed the rivets very slowly and carefully.  Squeeze, inspect, squeeze, inspect, squeeze, inspect.  The rivets came out OK with this method but my left arm was actually sore from the squeezing by the time I finished.  Nerve wracking.
My digital camera does fine at normal ranges but it just doesn't make it close up. 
 
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