Compression Tube Rivets
To start, I heard back from Steve Michael, a previous CarbonCub builder who helps CubCrafters with build support, and he said that the rivets for the compression tubes looked fine to him. He said that the stem does break off a little above/below flush sometimes and that it is fine. This means that the rivets were fine the whole time. A little frustrating that I dealt with this for so long and didn’t need to remove all the rivets but I’m glad to have it figured out now. I went ahead and installed the rest of the tube rivets to start my build session today so that section 61 of the wing manual was finally done.
Riveting Blocks and Fittings
I spent the rest of the build session working on section 72 of the manual, riveting in the blocks and fittings. These are all held in with solid rivets that I squeezed with my rivet squeezer and checked with a rivet gauge. I also used some masking tape over the spar bulb to prevent scratching it while putting the rivet squeezer on and off.
Installed block and protective tape
All of these went in pretty easily except for the 3rd block/fitting from the wing root on the front spar. The tube fitting there (P/N SC31303-001) has a piece sticking up that prevents getting the squeezer in and perpendicular to the top rivets. I played around with this some to see if I could figure out a geometry that would work but didn’t come up with anything. This is likely something that I’ll check the forums for and maybe make a post to see if anyone can tell me how they did it. This may just be a rivet that needs to be bucked instead. Section 7 is complete other than that troublesome pair of rivets.
The problematic fitting