I used the pneumatic squeezer to set these ***4- rivets.  I initially set the air pressure for the squeezer at around 90 psi.  However, these 4- rivets set fairly hard.  I ended up bumping the pressure to 100 psi and I now usually run squeezer pressure between 100-110 psi for any rivets I am setting.  The pneumatic squeezer, however, did a very nice job of providing consistent shop heads.  If you are SLO-BUILDING, don't do it without buying a pneumatic squeezer.

This was the first time that Tami and I attempted to buck rivets.  Tami bucked while I ran the rivet gun.  I gave her a short lesson on the finer points of riveting.  We tried one just so she could see how it worked.  It turned out really nice, so we kept going on the rest of the skin.

We followed Van's instructions for riveting the skin to the spars and ribs.  Worked pretty well.  A jig would have been nice just for holding the stabilizer so that we could rivet.  We had two rivets that were high as a result of improperly holding/bracing the stabilizer during riveting.  I drilled those out and put a new rivet in with no discrepancies.

Now that we have the stabilizer put together, I wonder if we should have primed the skin as well.  I have searched a number of web sites of fellow builders and there are very few who are priming the skins too.

Today, I spent the day prepping the vertical stabilizer spars, ribs, and rudder stiffeners.  I am not going to go into great detail here on my priming technique.

Long story short, clean and etch parts with Alumiprep, dip in Alodine, and prime...

The first couple of times I pressed the trigger on the paint gun, primer just trickled out (of course that was all over the parts to be primed).  I finally got the gun to work fairly well (at least it would atomize the primer and spit it out).  I set the pressure at the gun (or more accurately at the regulator on the bench) to around 35 Ibs.  I had to play with the two adjustment knobs on the gun for the fluid needle and the spray pattern.  The only way to set this us is to just spray on some scrap cardboard or wood until you get a nice pattern.

My first couple of parts look really poor...  They are well covered (and that includes primer runs).  Good thing these will be enclosed inside the stabilizer and rudder.  When I got done, I had some extra primer left and practiced with the paint gun (now in hindsight, it would only seem logical that I would have practiced 1st and then primed parts).  I primed two ribs from the horizontal stabilizer that I screwed up.  They turned out the nicest of all the parts I primed today.  It figures that they were the last parts I did.

Van's give you an option to cut out a series of lightening holes on the spar doubler.  I did not do this.  Main reason being that I did not have the cutting tool(s) to do this properly.  I checked the Yahoo RV-7/7A group and those builders who cut those out saved a little over 3 oz on the weight of the doubler.  In retrospect, I wish that I took the time to cut those out, however, it won't make any difference in the final product with the exception of the weight savings.

Pictured below is the dimpling of the vertical stabilizer skin.  I dimpled as much as possible with the pneumatic squeezer (SWEET!!! Love that Squeezer) and dimpled the remaining holes using the C-frame.  This was Tami and I's first attempt at using the C-frame.  I was pretty happy with the results.  Need a proper hammer to strike the C-Frame (A 16-oz claw hammer is not the right tool, I ended up purchasing a 12-oz soft face hammer- MUCH BETTER).  Also, if you drag the skin across the male dimple die (even very lightly), it will leave a scratch on the Al-Clad material.  A little time and attention on the 2nd side we dimpled resulted in fewer scratches around the hole.

The picture above is an example of two things.  One, I look for this "halo" mark around the dimple to ensure that I have a properly set dimple (if you see the "halo" and just inside the halo, the aluminum skin is a different shade, usually shinier when held up at various angles against the lighting, it means that you are hitting the skin to hard with the dimple die and are "crushing" the aluminum skin).  If I don't see the "halo" I re-dimple until I do.  It has been a pretty good GO-NO GO criteria.  The other example this picture shows is that if you are not really careful moving the skin around on the C-frame, you can expect to see surface scratches where the male dimple die runs across the skin.  This is not deep enough to cause concern, however, you want to be careful when moving the skins around.  If you have a 2nd set of hands, dimpling with the C-frame will go a lot faster and probably end up with fewer scratches.

The vertical stabilizer is ready for alumiprep and priming.

We put together the vertical stabilizer.  You can see Tami clecoing the VS-808PP spar doubler to the VS-803PP rear spar.

Look closely at the laptop, Van's RV-7 website on the screen to keep us motivated!!

After putting on the VS-801PP skin, we match drilled all of the skin holes to #40 and all spar to rib attachment points to #30.  this was pretty easy.  Van's should have had builders start with the vertical stabilizer first as this was alot easier and less complicated than the horizontal stabilizer.

Tami worked very diligently at de-burring the hundred's of holes in the vertical stabilizer parts after I de-burred the edges and marked the parts for re-assembly.