With yesterday's frustrations still looming in my mind, I needed to finish riveting the HS front spar together. I had about 20 rivets left to go and all needed to be driven. After not having much luck driving rivets yesterday I was a little timid about trying to finish this section. One thing I had going for me was that these rivets for the most part were very easy to get to making the actual process of setting them a bit easier.

So with that I set out to finish off this last bit of riveting. I started with the 4-5 rivets because of their slightly smaller length and ease of access. To my surprise these actually went very well and out of the 12 that needed to be set, I only messed one up and that's because I overdrove it as I got a little too enthusiastic. Ironically it was the first one I tried setting, it went in so easily that I got a little cocky and tried to finish it off just perfectly. With 11 of 12 rivets set fairly easily I turned my attention to the remaining rivets which were through the stiffener and doubler onto the spar itself. After the debacle the day before I was determined not to go that route again. Fortunately there was enough room to use the rivet gun and I managed to get most of these set without any issues. My issue of creasing the rivets that I experienced from yesterday wasn't a factor today as I had learned a better technique for holding the rivet gun and applying pressure to the factory head of the rivet. In fact I set all but one rivet correctly, the one I did mess up, I creased it again but it happened to be the one that was just slightly offset towards the edge of the stiffener and I could tell the rivet set was interfering with the edge. So I smiled one rivet out of the bunch.

This time I got smart and decided that I wouldn't try to set the other rivet that had this same spacing issue, INSTEAD I elected to set this one and it's twin opposite of all the others. After all, access to the rivet sometimes determines the direction the rivet gets set and it finally dawned on me that instead of trying to fight this rivet to drive it in the same direction as all the others, why not just set it the opposite way and be done with it. So that's exactly what I did after drilling my two ooops rivets out and resetting them. This time the rivets came out a little easier and I was able to use the same size rivets again instead of going up a size.

So all in all, a short night but a good night of work as I finally finished off this critical piece of structure and it feels great getting through this little learning experience. I will touch up the primer in a few areas later on before attaching the skins.