Spring break Rivet Filling & Rear Fuselage Rib Replacement (Part 1)
TLDR
- Filled a few dozen rivets with Amy
- Started to Replaced the rear fuselage rib at CF-RIB-007-R-C-3
Details
Rivet Filling
This week Amy has spring break, and I brought her to the hangar to do her favorite (also my favorite) chore: filling more rivets.
We mixed the Super-Fil two parts 1:1 and put into a syringe and used the syringe to apply the filler into each rivet center holes.
Amy has done this a few hundred times already, and she is a pro now. She can fill the rivet holes much faster and neater than I can. I did reward her with youtube time after the job done.
Before the filler dried out in the syringe, we got about a few dozen rivets on the passenger side. We are actually pretty close to fill all rivets on the fuselage, with only passenger side under canopy, and the underbelly side remaining.
Rear Fuselage Rib Replacement
So under the rear seat area there are 6 ribs going across left to right. And I have installed the ELT between the the first and second ribs on the passenger side. Unfortunately, when I was drilling holes to mount the ELT brackets, I accidently drilled a hole through the rib (CF-RIB-007-R-C-3) lighting hole’s bending part. After reading up AC43.13 and consulting Gemini, it’s possible to just patch it with a doubler, or replace with a new part.
Since the area is still reasonably accessible, I decided to just replace it for the peace of mind.
Even though the rib was accessible, drilling it out was not a small task. I spent a good amount of time just drilling out the rivets to free the old rib. Once all rivets on the old rib were out the rib still didn’t want to come out, because there is another part locking all the rib horizontally at the rear. So I drilled out another ~25 rivets to free everythting up.
Then I thoroughly cleaned the area with a vacuum, and placed the new rib with a few clecos.
I was able to install most of the rivets (bottom row and some from the front) but ran out of time today. I will complete the rest of riveting next time, which will probably take me another 2 hours :-/
