I was pleased to see that my order from Van's finally arrived. This shipped on 4/16/09 via priority mail, yet it took four (business) days to arrive...not much of a priority apparently. :-(

Note the bag of AN470AD4-22 rivets. I had previouly ordered .1 lb and got a total of four rivets. This time I ordered .2 lb and got a whole bag full of them. Hrm.

First task for the night was to remove the nutplates, drill the screw holes up to #19, and reinstall the nutplates.

These little brackets got nutplates installed. When I drilled and deburred these parts long ago, I countersunk the rivet holes. If I had it to do over again, I think I would dimple the holes. I prefer the look of dimpled holes better.

These gussets that go between the lower firewall weldments and the vertical firewall stiffeners also got one nutplate each.

I decided to assemble the elevator bellcrank. Easy stuff. :-)

Then it was time to re-rivet the spacer blocks on the center section. The problem, however, is that these rivets are too large to be squeezed, so they need to be driven / bucked. Kerin was in full pumpkin mode on the sofa by this time, so she wasn't going to be able to help, so how was I going to buck these guys.

This little wood template is what I came up with to prevent my gun from sliding around too much. I thought this would work out pretty well...

But I ended up boogering up the rivets again. Gah, this is frustrating. Four freakin' rivets to install and I can't seem to get 'em done. I drilled these out for the third time and called it a night. I'll figure out what to do tomorrow.