Summing up the last couple of days - Challenging - More tools on order

So no pics just yet, but coming..... Over the past couple of days I have been cleaning and prepping aluminum and dimpling the frame for the rudder. Finally had to sucumb to the need to grind down my 3 inch yoke for my squeezer. As so many others have already experienced before me, you run into problems dimpling the bottom rib of the rudder - NOT the much smaller tip rib mind you, which seems to have enough clearance between the bend line of the flange and the rivet holes, but the much larger, much wider bottom rib ( you know, the one I had to replace a while back). Before I go on, I blame Vans for all this ridiculousness. Why in the hell can't they form a part with sufficient clearance for most of the common tools being used out there today. Just plain ridiculous...

Anyway, the holes I dimpled in both ribs with the pneumatic squeezer and the newly ground down yoke seemed to go OK, but eventually you get down to the last 4 or 5 holes toward the trailing edge of each rib, adn there is not enough room for the squeezer to dimple those holes. So in comes the close quarter dimpling tool I have been raving about so much in past posts.

SO I began thinking that since this is a tool designed for close quarters work, surely it must have enough clearance built into it so as to avoid interfering with the web of the rib, right? Boy was I wrong, and I did not find out until after I had dimpled 6 holes in the bottom rib. I did notice that the flange did not seem to want to sit quite level on the tool, but I thought it was close enough, so I ignored the warning sign.

Anyway, I ended up putting some very small but very pronounced 1/16th inch divets in the web of the rib, in line with each dimple. This was caused by the front edge of the steel frame of the tool, which houses the female dimple dye, scraping against the web of the rib while I created the dimple with the rivet gun.

So I spent most of the rest of this evening sanding out the divets - man is that hard - they are right above the bend line of the rib flange, adjacent to the dimple. I had to cut small pieces of 220 aluminum oxide sand paper, fold them up as small as I could, and use my thumbs to grind down the divets. It's too risky to try putting a small dremel grinding tool in there, and both of my small scotch brite wheels are just a tad too large to fit down in that area without mucking up other things. Man are my thumbs worn down from all that sanding. I managed to get about 3 of them soothed out to the point where I am satisfied that there are no stress risers, but I still have 3 more to do tomorrow before I can continue with other tasks.

I ground down the tip of the close quarter dimpling tool and all is well now - no more divets on the last 5 holes of the rib.

As for tools, I ordered a bunch more dimple dies from Cleaveland tools - a set of 3/32 tank dimple dies, a 3/32 and 1/8 inch reduced diameter female die, and a Set for a #10 screw, which is needed for the dimples that will house the flush head of a #10 screw that will attach the lead counterweight to the inside of the tip rib of the rudder. I also ordered a rivet cuttter because I have it on good authority from Steve Riffe's posts on his builders log that many of the rivets used to set the parts of the rudder frame are slightly long, and need to be trimmed down just a bit to avoid problems when squeezing the rivets. I purchased the reduced diameter female dimple dies because they were only 18 bucks a piece, and Cleaveland did all the work so I won't have to. Others are taking standard sized dimple dies adn grinding them down. I ahve had my fill of grinding down tools at this point.

Hopefully I will get the skin primed and dimpled tomorrow.