Riveting Of Tail Cone Nutplates Finally Completed

Bernie came by the hangar today to give me a hand with riveting the last two rivets for the nutplates closest to the upper surface of the stabilator. My original plan was to use a rivet gun to set the remaining two rivets … but upon much closer analysis, we decided that would be risky. The problem stemmed from the stabilator’s mounting bracket being very close to the rivet hole that the rivet gun could possibly easily begin banging on the bracket.  Decided to just use a pop rivet instead … both nutplates have one solid rivet in them, so the nutplates are not going anywhere. Ended up using CCR264SS-3-2 rivets in the place of the AN426AD3-3.5 rivets.

The rivet closest to the upper skin of the stabilator received a CCR264SS-3-2 pop rivet. Felt this was safer than pounding the rivet because of the close proximity to the stabilator’s mounting bracket which can be seen in the photo just below the rivet.


After finishing up with the tail cone, was showing Bernie how the autopilot disconnect was going to get wired and realized I did not have any Molex .092 connector pins. I had pins for the .063 connectors but not the larger .092 connectors. So a fair amount of time was spent this afternoon trying to locate pins locally. After locating the connector pins,  began working on the wiring for the two rocker switches for the fuel pump and the left landing light which will be covered in the next post.