Days like today are the day I love. Finally got to do some riveting. By the end of it all, I had the internal parts to both the left and right elevators riveted together.

The first step was to rivet the two end ribs together. I accomplished this by using a longeron yoke in the pneumatic squeezer. To make it work, I had to adjust the ram on the squeezer to the right setting, then take out the dies so that I could fit it around the rib flanges then put the dies back in as pictured below:

Upon finishing this step I was left with these two assemblies:

Next step is to rivet the plate nuts and reinforcement plates to the back of the main spars:

Then we move onto attaching the inboard ribs to the spar. Flush head rivets are used here because the elevator horns are riveted over the top of them:

I decided that while the pneumatic squeezer is great, there are times when a hand squeezer is the better option. With the pneumatic squeezer, once you push the button, it goes from open to closed. The hand squeezer allows you to partially extended the ram and is a better option for the hard to reach rivets. Also when you only have 4 rivets of a kind to deal with, it’s nice to not have to change the pneumatic squeezer setup just to accomplish this. I splurged and got a “Main Squeeze” from Cleaveland Aircraft Tool:

After the inboard ribs, we install the counterweight rib assembly to the spar:

This is the left elevator. I did much better on the right. For left, I “smileyed” one of the rivets so bad that I had to drill it out. Drilling it out was a bitch because the smiley made it difficult to center the drill bit and I ended up enlarging the hole. I drilled it to #19 and used one of the extra BSPQ5-4 rivets here. These are the same rivets used to finish fastening the rear spar to the main ribs on the horizontal stabilizer (See this post for reference). Van’s gives you some extras believe it or not. The other rivet was also smileyed but not nearly as bad. The shop head was perfect for that one at least. This is one of those ones where drilling it out would probably only make it worse. It’s good enough:

A view from the other side:

And then last, we install the elevator horns: