Holy cow..... 4 months since the last update.... Ugh!!!! Life!!!!! Well back at it after a lot of life events, international trips at work and just very little free time. So here we are back to working on the vertical stab. In the last few months, the ribs and spars were primed and made ready for finally assembly. That's about all I was able to accomplish. Have I ever mentioned that I really don't like the priming process? Thinking about not even priming the wings. We'll see. First task was to rivet the spar doubler to the "rear spar"..... We'll get to that in a second. The bottom section of the assembly, along the bottom of the "rear" spar has you set the rivets flush so that this section can be bolted onto the aft fuselage later on in the build. So that required carefully noting which rivets those were and dimpling the skin of the spar and countersinking the spar doubler as it's a much thicker part. The dimpling was easy and after a few trial and error holes, the countersink bit was set and the rest of the holes were drilled to fit their corresponding dimples. With everything complete, the parts fit together snugly. With that task complete, it was time to bust out the rivet gun, fire up the compressor and try to remember how to rivet as I haven't done that in about 6 months. Much to my surprise, I still had the touch and managed to set 65 clean rivets without having to redo a single one. I finally feel like a actually have a feel for it now and almost enjoy it. So that part went well. Now let's talk about the "rear" and "forward" spars of the vertical stabilizer. Here you have to be very careful as the technical drawings have the orientation backwards as it relates to the actual aircraft. So for the construction on this whole assembly, the larger spar, the one with the doubler, is actually considered the rear spar even though it sits forward of the other spar, the one Vans refers to as the "forward" spar. This led me to have an oops, fortunately for me, it's one that will not cause me any issues when it comes time to put the skin on, so I got lucky. The next set of instructions are to rivet the VS 704, 705, 706 and 707 pieces to the front spar. That's literally the way the instructions read. SO BE CAREFUL HERE!!!! THE 'FRONT' SPAR IS PART NUMBER VS-702, not VS-803PP. All Vans would have to do to prevent this confusion is to add that part number, VS-803PP to that line of instructions. So anyhow I went ahead (before I realized my mistake) and riveted, or tried to, rivet VS706 to VS-803PP. That's the top rib, just two rivets, piece of cake right... I had just set 65 rivets without an issue, why bother doing anything differently.... WRONG AGAIN!!! These two 470 4-4 rivets are small enough and easy enough to set with a hand squeezer, which is what I should have done to start with. Instead I tried to buck them with the rivet gun and not only did I crease the head of the rivet, I actually cut it clean in half, that's a new one for me..... So how do you drill out a rivet missing half its head....? Fortunately I was able to slowly and carefully drill it out from the shop head side (opposite of what you'd normally do) and with a little patience, get the rivet out cleanly without enlarging the hole. So with that out of the way, I was able to set the two rivets easily with a hand squeezer. Geez, another tough lesson learned the hard way. But I was proud of myself as in trying to set the rivet the first time with the gun and literally cutting it in half, this left this part of the rib slightly bent out of shape. I just happened to remember a tip I read somewhere to take two flat rivet sets and put them in your hand squeezer, use those two flat sets and gently squeeze the area flat again, this worked like a charm and I gave myself a mental attaboy for remembering this. It was after this that I started referencing the next rib to rivet on and noticed that the technical drawings were calling for blind rivets to be used. This made no sense to me as I was easily able to access the rib and spar. Fortunately I know enough now that when the plans call for something you don't think is correct, there's usually a good reason. So I asked on FB and almost immediately got my answer. That answer as I described above was that I was reversing the spars, I thought the "rear" was the aft spar when in reality for the plans and construction of this part, it's actually the "front" spar. You can't rivet the ribs to the larger spar yet as you first need to rivet on the skin. You don't have access to the back side of this joint once the skin is in place, hence the need for blind rivets in this location. Again, Vans was right, I was wrong. I'm getting used to that. So that was a good place to stop for the night. In a few hours our neighborhood would be a war zone as people celebrate Independence Day, It was good to get back at it. Vans says that the wing kit will be here in either August or September. We'll see. Oshkosh starts in three weeks, it will good to be back after the pandemic and missing last year.