B

Baseball Dad

Member
I'm having trouble getting my flush rivets to look good when finished. There seems to be a slight depression in the skin around the rivet when I'm finished. It doesn't matter if I'm squeezing or shooting they all turn out the same. Someone has suggested that I may be over squeezing but I've played around with that and that doesn't appear to be it. I know I'm not over dimpling, the skin looks real good after the dimpling process, it's somewhere in the actual riveting process that I'm failing.

Any tips or advice?
 
Try taking your deburring tool and giving it a couple spins in the dimpled hole. Don't go nuts here...just a couple of turns does the job. It flattens out the walls of the dimple, allowing the rivets to sit in there real nice. Works great.

Regards,
 
You can try posting a picture, but I think you're doing everything just fine. Flush rivets are not going to leave you with a 100% smooth as glass surface. They do sit down in the dimple just a hair.

PJ
RV-10 #40032
 
Try doing a mini back rivet: after rivetting, use a small tap of a hammer on the shop head with a bucking bar on the rivet head for those rivets that are a little depressed; just be careful and don't over do it. I did this on those rivets on the quickbuild kit that came dished. (None of MY rivets are dished....:)) It worked great and flattened out the great majority of the dishing.

Peter Schwarzenbach
QB 7
 
I think you're probably worrying about something you won't notice at at once you've painted, but the advice above seems pretty good in order to try to minimize it. Seeing a "halo" around your dimple is a pretty good indication that the dimple is deep enough. That said, even then you're going to have a little bit of an indentation after riveting. Good luck.
 
I had the same concern you did when I finished my HS. My skins were beautiful after they were dimpled, but they didn't look like the pictures of other RV's after I riveted them on. What I did was look at other unpainted __flying__ RV's. Their HS's looked like mine. I also had a EAA tech counselor come out to look my stuff over. Everything was fine.
 
Several weeks ago I ran across a thread here (can't find it now) where someone mentioned using a metal hammer instead of a rubber mallet or dead blow hammer. I didn't believe it would make that much difference, I had been using a rubber mallet and was getting the halo effect that everyone says is normal.

On a whim I tried using a metal hammer, a regular claw hammer was within reach so that's what I tried. What a difference! The dimples are crisp with no halo at all.

I do think there is more to getting a good dimple than some think. Sure if you have a good solid table with no flex and a hard hammer then you'll have good dimples from the start. If the table flexes or the hammer is soft, then you will get acceptable dimples but not as good as they could have.

Give it a try on some scrap, make sure the table doesn't flex and use a metal hammer (with eye protection). You will soon learn you don't need as much force or as many blows to get a really crisp dimple. A couple of light taps is all it takes.

Rat
 
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