A Riveting Workshop

This weekend, Miguel and I attended an EAA SportAir Workshop. If you’re not familiar, SportAir workshops cover a variety of techniques needed to build all kinds of airplanes, from the metallic ones like the RV-10, to composite like the Long-EZ, to fabric covered like the Piper Cub. These two-day workshops came over to our corner of the county, so we signed up for the sheet metal basics course to hone some RV-10 skills.

Four different workshops (sheet metal, electrical, composites, fabric covering) were all being held at the Museum of Flight Restoration Center on Paine Field in Everett. This is not to be confused with the actual Museum of Flight on Boeing Field in Seattle. The Restoration Center is run by the museum and restores aviation artifacts to museum quality for display at the Museum of Flight amongst others. It is also an extremely distracting place to work. Our workbenches were situated between a T-6 Texan, a Lockheed JetStar (an airplane I was only able to identify after a fair amount of Wikipediaing) and an amazing part of yesterday’s tomorrow, the full-scale Boeing SST mockup.

The workshop covered tools, materials, fasteners, layout of fastener patterns, drilling, countersinking and dimpling, deburring, riveting, and forming. We had a brief bit of lecture, then it was on to the practice exercises. The first one had us do a simple layout and assembly with different kinds of rivets. The second was a representative wing/control surface with a hinged tab and access cover.

In all, I learned the following few things:

1. Miguel works faster than I do — I was always catching up.
2. Also, I need to take my time. When I tried to catch up, my error rate would markedly increase.
3. Assembling aluminum parts makes time disappear.
4. Metal identification codes run in the longitudinal direction of the sheet, i.e. the words go with the grain.
5. I still can’t drill out a rivet without oversizing the hole, so I’m going to need a lot of practice or a lot of oops rivets.
6. The ATS pneumatic drill I was using was terrible as I had no control of low RPM settings. I need to make sure that I try out some drills before buying one.
7. Also, they use a metric crap-load of air. When more than a few people were drilling at the same time, pressure losses in the main hose caused us to lose drill torque. So I’ll need to make sure the compressor is large enough without always having to refill, or add some tanks in line.
8. And having a couple drills may be useful, especially for smaller assemblies. There were many times where we’d have a #40 and a countersink loaded in two separate drills and it made things go way faster.
9. Same thing applies for rivet squeezers.
10. I will need a lot of light in the shop. There were many times shadows made pre-punching hole locations difficult due to overhead lighting.
11. I’m fairly confident I can assemble an RV-10 and not want to give up halfway though.
12. And my rivet squeezing hand will be in killer shape.

If you’re considering taking a workshop, I would recommend it. While I would have liked a little more interaction with the instructor while building the example projects, I was still able to figure out what works, what doesn’t, where I need improvement, and what I should be thinking about when I put the shop together.