I'm now officially in my third year of the build having acquired the empennage kit in January of 2019. So three years down who knows how many more to go. It's done when it's done at this point and the crazy long lead times for kits these days will not help. Wing kit is scheduled to arrive by late summer this year so we'll see where things go this year. I am finally making more steady progress thanks to more time at home. To start back at it, it was time to rivet the left side nose rib into place. HS-707 is small enough and you would think would be fairly straight forward to rivet in place. Yes and no. Due to its position inside the stab, it's a bit tricky to get to to set these small -3 size rivets. So a bit of prep and planning had to go into this task which is why it ended up taking over 3 hours to get all of these set. The drawings indicate you can use blind rivets on the bottom if you wish due to the difficulty in reaching it but I at least wanted to try setting these rivets first before I went that route. The plans have you rivet the HS-707 to the top side of the skin first, then use the ribs 706 and 708 cleco'd in place to help rivet the bottom side of 707 in place. I used one of my stands that I built to hold the rudder to hold the left hand side of the HS in place and help 'shape' the skin around the HS-707 rib. I remember from the mock up of this section that the skin is very resistant to forming around it so pre-shaping the skin was a must. I ended up using some paracord I had laying around to help close the skin around the rib and that worked well. I also used a stand to get some height above the piece which gave me better access and leverage. So the top side rivets went in ok and I managed not to mangle any of them. The bottom side is a bit more challenging. Once you cleco in the supporting ribs, there is minimal room to get a hand and arm in that space to hold a bucking bar. This would have been a great place to have another set of hands to help me rivet but I made it work. I ended up flipping the piece over which gave me much better access to the bottom side rivets. I managed to set the first couple ok, then mangled the third. Take a deep breath, relax and think! The other rivets went in ok but it was pretty hard to get the rivet gauge in there to check them. The -3 rivets are so tiny that it's easy to mess them up and it's a bit hard to tell if they're set fully since the the shop head protrudes from the bottom of the dimple. So 11 out of 12 set, not too bad. I spent about 15 minutes drilling out the one bad one, it was not cooperating. Again the -3's are a pain because they are so small to begin with. Fortunately in my rivet removal kit I have a #50 drill bit to use on these -3 screw ups. So with enough 'encouragement' it finally came loose although I ended up having to drill out the body of the rivet as the head didn't want to come off. With that sorted, I simply held the whole piece and proceeded to set a new -3 rivet. It immediately bent over......! WHAT!!!!! When I went to see how bad it was, the whole rivet fell out. Hmmmm..... weird. So I tried again with a new rivet. This one didn't tip, it just fell out like the first do-over. Turns out there was still a small piece of the original rivet stuck in the whole which was preventing the rivets from setting properly. I tried to clear it out, nothing worked. So I upside the whole to a #30 and used an 'oops' rivet from that kit and set the rivet normally. So all in all, 3.5 hours of time to get these 12 little rivets set. It's progress!