June 10, 2004

I know I took some more pictures of the riveting process, but I can't find them. If I do, I'll stick them up. The next shot that showed up was this one...

The red arrow points to a rivet that became a major pain in the neck. If you look closely, you'll see that the bottom-right side has a very slight lift to it. Might be acceptable on some rivets (I think the tolerance is .002, but have to check), but these brackets are pretty important, so out it came.

That presented the next problem...during the drilling out, the hole became larger. Now, this happens, and isn't usually a big deal. Part of the problem was the starting size of the rivet AN470AD4-10, and the combined thickness being riveted. When I tried another rivet of the same size, I couldn't get a big enough head because so much material went to increasing the size of the shaft. I figured I had a couple of options

Try a AD4-11+ rivet, using the extra length to fatten up the shaft
Use an AD5-10 of the 'oops' that would leave me with an AD4 head.
Use a regular AD5-10 and have one head larger than the rest, or
Drill it out and insert a bolt.
Pro-seal some aluminum stock in place and re-drill.

I posted a not on the RV mailing list, and the folks that responded came back with basically the same ideas (I hadn't thought of numbers 4 or 5). I was really hating the idea of having to order rivets/bolts and wait for them to arrive, so on friday the search for local replacements would begin.