Section: 32
Hours: 5

I ran over to Harbor Freight and picked up a pneumatic pull rivet gun. After I got home it took a couple hours of fiddling to get it set up and working. The instructions for the gun have you take off the bottom lid of the vacuum canister and check the oil level. It was really hard to get the lid off and the oil level was fine. Then I switched out tips so I could shoot the LP4-3 rivets and discovered the small tip that came with the gun was clogged with metal flash. I had to drill it out before it would accept any rivets. Then I installed the air hose adapter and everything worked! The instruction manual is a little wonky, but the gun came with a set of replacement parts so hopefully I can keep it running for the duration of the project.

After I started using it I noticed some small drops of oil were landing on the work. There is a good size air exhaust on the front of the gun that burps out a small amount of oil with each shot. I taped a couple layers of paper towel over the exhaust to catch the oil before it gets all over my clean primed surfaces. I plan to put a finish coat of paint in the cockpit area and would prefer not to have it contaminated with oil.

I was able to shoot the remainder of the pull rivets in the remaining baggage floor. The rivet gun gives a very satisfying "thunk" sound when it pulls the rivets. The gun was too big to reach the rivets at the outside edge of the floor so I still hand pulled some rivets.

I started setting the solid rivets and nut plates along the inside edge but didn't quite finish up. To be continued tomorrow.