MastanKhan
Junior Member
That's a fine riveting job, if you have your structure and your skin predrilled, when you begin to set your rivets, you may pull the skin away from the pre-drilled holes in the structure, that can cause the skin to buckle and not lay flat against the structure. If you have to ream out the rivet holes, you will end up with more clearance between the hole and the rivet. Ideally the rivet fits into the hole with almost an interference fit, a little tension going in, and when you place the bucking bar behind the rivet, you have a nice clean head peened on, that pulls the rivet up snug and fills the hole neatly with minimal clearance all the way around.
Riveting is an art, I can't do it, but I can tell you if the gent who did knows what he's doing, lol. Skins all almost always riveted or bonded to the underlying structure, sometime skins are "flush riveted" and butt up against one another,sometime they over lap one another, depending on the area being skinned as well as the complexity of the aircraft being skinned...
My little brother has a Cessna Cardinal, a beautiful airplane, but an airplane that is know for a less than pristine finish, rivet lines meandering around, and even skins that don't lay very nice... The 1968 Cardinal had a cantilever "laminar flow" wing, very clean with a sharp leading edge, with only 150 hp, you could get in trouble, and as you increased angle of attack, the laminar flow wing would "load up" and get draggy, not good for a generation of Cessna 172 pilots who were used to a much more forgiving wing. In addition the Cardinal wing is probably a foot further aft, creating the need for a stabilator to increase pitch force to allow for a smooth flare, but the stabilator itself would suddenly stall, allowing the nose to "fall through" and taking out a great many nose gears and firewalls... Cessna fixed their airplane, but it was a LOT of work done for free, under a program know as the "Cardinal Rule"
In fact those large round head rivets are "Cherry Max" type "pulled rivets" for riveting "blind" holes, in other words you can't get a "bucking bar" behind it, so you use the large headed "Cherry Max" pulled rivets, there is a very strong steel core that "pulls" the back of the rivet into shape from behind... unlike the "flush rivets" you see in the middle of the panel.
Hi,
Thank you for an excellent explanation about rivets and riveting---.
