Having used the squeezer to set as many of the rivets as I could, I had reached the point of having to get out the rivet gun and whack some rivets for the first time in over a year. Since it's been a while I knew I needed some practice first before I jumped into this section. So I spent a little bit of time yesterday and more today practicing with the rivet gun (3X in my case) and trying different air pressure settings and regulator settings. I also talked with my tech counselor to get his input on what I may be doing wrong as I just cannot get consistently acceptable results. To me, driving rivets with the rivet gun in is the most challenging part of the build so far. Hopefully a year or two from now I will read this and laugh. But for now it's a real pain as each rivet that gets messed up requires 15 or more minutes to drill out and fix.

So after trying a few different things, different bucking bars, different pressures out of the compressor, I decided to change out the pressure regulator on the gun so a quick trip to a local tool store and I was ready to go. A few more practice rivets after I got home with the new regulator installed and I was feeling pretty confident.

I moved my bench vice onto my main work table which allowed me to secure the work and have a lot better access to it. It was time to buck some rivets. First rivet set was perfect, whew! So with my confidence bolstered, I proceeded to mangle and 'smiley' the next four rivets in a row....... Son of a......

So after spending all that time practicing here I was staring at 4 AN470 4-7 rivets in a row that had smiley's on them. They talk about how frustrating it will be to build an airplane, today was one of those days for sure. To make matters worse, only after screwing up these four did I realize that I actually could get the squeezer in there and just squeeze the rivets. Lesson learned. Turns out the lip of the spar stiffener was too close to the rivet set causing it to interfere with the action of the rivet gun. Again lesson learned, after the third one I realized this and changed the rivet set to an offset one, that didn't help either and having screwed up four in a row, I called a time out and got out the rivet removal tools.

Usually I can get the -3 rivets out pretty easily due to their small size. The -4 or -5 rivets are a bit harder to get out cleanly. These were no exception, 3 of the 4 stretched the original hole. I ended up enlarging them to a #21 size hole which corresponds to a -5 rivet. Knowing I could just squeeze these instead of trying to drive them again, I elected to just use a -5 rivet of the same length and squeeze them instead. The result was three 'ooops' rivets to show for my work. You can always go up a size in rivets as long as the hole doesn't get too distorted. Fortunately there was no issue with edge distance.

So this was a good place to end for the night, lots of frustration, lots of lessons learned, lots of curse words.... The remaining rivets all have to be driven, the squeezer can't access them, they should go better as they are not as hard to get to.