Something looks weird here....
 

Yep, it looks weird because there are no clecos! the wings are about to come out of the wing stand. I cant believe it. Am I really building an airplane? What a good feeling. My wife helped me with riveting on all the wing skins. she did great.

Here is the pilot side wing


and here is the pax side wing

Congratulations!

I like the notes on the wing jig - simple ideas like this save mistakes!

spark68

I know, it is kind of strange to see major assemblies like that with no clecos sticking out at odd angles, isn't it?

Question for you
 

What method did you use for riveting the skins; standard buck or back riveting? I'm very close to the skin riveting stage with the wife helping and seriously considering back riveting where possible as she sometimes has difficulties holding the bucking bar.

Wings
 

Hopefully JR will chime in.
I tried back riveting but couldn't get nice shop heads so I switched to standard mushroom set and tungsten bar. My building partner held the bar on the inside.
I'm not sure how I will set the bottom rivets yet.

On one wing, my college grad son held the bucking bar on the outside and I back riveted with a double offset back rivet set. I was not impressed witht he results. On the other wing my wife ran the gun with a 2" flat set with rubber ring; I used the tungsten bucking bar on the inside. The results were much better.

here is how I did it
 

I had to set the air pressure up to about 70psi to get good shop heads, but once I figured that out, it worked good. The skins came out beautifully. My wife had never even walked into the shop (garage) before we started and we did not practice prior to starting on the wings. I just told her to hold the heavy bar against the rivet, and don't let it bounce. If you're going to get your wife to help, who has no idea about the difference between a rivet and a bolt, it seems to me the backrivet method is the only way to go.
I used this (the offset one):

My wife used this on the wing skin

I thought that too, but it took an astonishingly short amount of time to have her handling the rivet gun like a pro. And she's pretty picky about quality too, so if the factory head wasn't flush with the skin she'd let em know she was going to hit it again. I was very happy with the results. Never could get that double-offset back rivet set to give really good results.

that is funny because my wife was the same way during the riveting sessions. She would say "we need to redo this one" and I would look at it, and it was fine, but she would say, "no, it needs to be perfect" so we would go at it again. I couldn't help but think to myself, "How in the world does she know what perfect should be?" But, I didn't say a word, and we enjoyed our time together out there.

I used the double-offset backriveting set on my wing skins, and they came out flawless. And it was easy!

The secret to doing this successfully has already been mentioned, but it needs to be said again. You have to turn the air pressure WAY up! I used about 80 psi and all of a sudden, results are excellent. Remember, there's a lot of mass in that long heavy rivet set, so you need more power to drive it. It's that simple!



My son Daniel with the bucking bar:



Backriveting, the easy way:



The final results: