Aircraft Flush Riveting, RV Builder Basics

building a metal airplane carts are going to be riveting the airplane together so the other most important tool probably in your workshop is the rivet gun this is what the rivet gun looks like it's a two X gun usually the longer barrel here the more more powerful you have usually a 2x and a 3x or you can get by with a 3x gun in your workshop 2x is a little small for their larger rivets it works fine for the little rivets that we're setting right here 3x is almost too much power for these rivets but we can turn down the volume you need a good swivel or something on the bottom of your rivet gun and a little adjustable air to adjust the air pressure going to the gun I'll show you just a minute how we adjust the air to make sure it's not hitting too hard and too soft you have different heads that go in here this is called a mushroom head you can see here it kind of looks like a mushroom this has rubber around it so that when you put it against the manufactured into the rivet head keeping it perpendicular the rudder rubber helps you keep it perpendicular so that when you do set the rivet it will not Mar the face of your material you have other there's another type of rivet head this is a again a mushroom type rivet head with a rubber around it the the only thing different on this head as you set the surface you can see your shaft actually turns so it even helps you anymore if you happen to be a little bit off-center with your gun your rivet heads will stay flush with the material that you're working with for your dome head type rivets the non-flush the other ones work advanced this is the rivet head set that actually goes over the dome head of the rivet and it's in it's an in the gun also and you set it with a bucking bar now I keep mentioning about bucking bars when you have on the manufactured end of the rivet and we're getting ready to rivet we have to have something on the backside to compress the rivet this is a type of bucking bar here that we put up against the rivet this is one style they're just many many many styles it was just another style for a different angle this is a very unusual style you can use it to get in this way or this way or you go this way or or this way so many ways to get in there to reach a rivet these small rivets I like to use a small palm type book bucking bar like this now the important thing to member on riveting is you'll see a lot of people think that you have to just push with this bucking bar so hard that you're actually doing the work it's not let the bucking bar do the work for you in other words long as you hold a rivet gun tight against your material here and the bucking bar in place the bucking bar will do the work where you can get in trouble with a bucking bar is if you're not square with your material or your rivet so if you're on an angle you're going to fold over your rivet if you slide off your rivet and the gun is pounding you're actually going to pound a big dimple area in your skin and that's bad so the important thing on the bucking bar is to let it do its work hold it up against the rivet I usually like to keep my thumb nearby or something either keep it perpendicular to the exactly square with the rivet perpendicular to material and I keep a thumb or something there so it won't walk off or move away from the rivet when I press the gun there it's just going to be a just a short burst just just kind of a burn and then to set it once you get to setting just hundreds of these rivets with a by yourself or most time you're going to have a somebody a partner because he's going to be on the other side of the material and you can't see him and he's going to be holding it and you're going to come up with a plan there like you gonna put the rivet in put the gun on there he's going to find it he might push on it yeah go yeah I'm on the rivet in fact I'll show you that right now we'll put the rivet in and say I'm up a gun on the gun here you can see I got the bucking bar straight on the rivet and see I'm pushing on it so you know you're solid against it when you're ready go ready I'm ready go and you push the gun and just a short burst and you set the rivet you'll foot you'll actually after a while setting when you set hundreds of these the Alexa can hear the change in the sound of the rivet when it sets as the rivet sets it actually gets hard and it'll squish out so far on the on the shop in to that one and a half times that the diameter and then you'll hear a sound a change in the sound so you know it's set properly it's just a short burst as always you calibrate it again you can use your gauge if you lose your calibration you can go along like that and look at it and said that's okay if you're in an area to where you cannot see the rivets at all I can't see it I can see it with a mirror you can actually take your finger put your finger on there you can see the little hole indentation and kind of look at it and see if that's a correct size so if you can't see it just reach in and hit with your finger real quickly look at it with your gauge that yep that's a good rivet so now what we're going to do is I'm going to hook up the air to the gun we're going to adjust a gun it will be a noisy well make sure you wear ear protection and then we're going to take and set this rivet here using a bucking bar I've hooked up the air to our rivet gun now I'm going to show you how we need to adjust the air pressure I'm going to start off with the air kind of low you always want to have make sure you have something against the end of this gun before you pull the trigger because if you pull the trigger you can actually shoot this whatever you have in here out across the room it can just brick spring and go so you always be going to be very careful this is a gun so it has a projectile in the front of it the first I'm going to put this up against through some wood here and I'm going to push it this is very low air setting let's see it's just kind of wimpy it's not very doing very much I'm going to turn up the air a little bit more it's a little bit better and I'm gonna turn it up with just a little bit more that's about right now I'll show you what happens if you have it too much too much air pressure going on it just it's way too much pressure and you can't control it you see that's it just goes crazy so we're turning it back down and you'll get a good feel for now that feels pretty good so we're now we're ready to Rivet can you go ahead and put the rivet in make sure it's flush I usually double check to make sure is the proper length I want to make sure that the rivet gun is perpendicular to our material here always want to do that if you don't you can end up with a smiley face which I'll show you that in just a minute if we don't have it perpendicular you can mess it up so first watch what's up against there we're going to put our bucking bar up against the rivet make sure it's perpendicular to this shop end of the rivet you know if you want to make sure you're not tilted one way or the other because you've already a fold over your rivet now I'm going to anchor my thumb right here just to kind of keep this bar from not walking off the rivet because if it walks off the rivet you can really dent the side of the metal and again we're going to let it bark the bucking bar do this you notice I'm not really got a big brute strength really pushing hard on this I've just got the bucking bar there holding it nice and firmly in place not a lot of pressure and then hold in place we got it anchored we're perpendicular guns perpendicular then we're going to give it about a one-and-a-half second burst here okay let's take a look at a rivet okay okay that's a nice-looking rivet there you noticed we take and put the rivet gauge on it we'll go over the head there and you can see there it just won't clear that so that's a very good we've squashed that out on the menu factory door what to call the shop man I'm sorry very very nicely so that's how you set a good rivet

Channel: SkywardMedia

Views: 474,577

Rating: 4.293118 out of 5

Keywords: RV, Vans, airplane, aircraft, rivet, riveting, aluminum, aluminium, metal, homebuilding, homebuilt, DVD, techniques, Les Bourne, Skyward Media, RV-3, RV-4, RV-6, RV-7, RV-8, RV-9, RV-10, RV-12

Id: 3zQaMz7rtqY

Length: 9min 0sec (540 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 09 2009