After getting back from Cleveland, Chris and I worked on finishing up some of the hard-to-buck rivets on the fuselage. We found we needed to modify a bucking bar to get behind the rivets which were directly inline with the F-704 bulkhead. That required a lot of hacksawing. Chris and I traded off doing the hacksawing and while I was at it, he deburred and chamfered the strips which join the forward and aft halves of the canopy frame.

Here we're about 40% through the long cut.

It's a good thing I had a decent hacksaw with a fresh blade.

Roughly 30 minutes of hard labor later we were done. I didn't get any pictures of the rivets we used this for, but it's the single rivet on each side of the fuselage which attaches the canopy deck to the longeron directly above the forward half of the F-704 bulkhead.

Moving aft, the first attempt to clamp the F-705G brackets in place wasn't entirely successful due to some interference with a couple of rivets attaching the side skin to the longeron.

It just required some relief in the appropriate locations.

We riveted the right side bracket first. The forward side came out great.

But the backside...not so great. Got a nasty smiley on one of the outboard three rivets which had to be driven from the back side due to the canopy deck being in the way.

Pretty much the same story on the left side. Oh well, at least it's hidden from view.

The front face looks good, though.

Our friend Brent came over to visit and snapped a couple of photos. Here Chris is just chasing one of the holes that attach the gusset to the bulkhead.

We were able to squeeze these rivets with the longeron yoke; however, we had to use the main squeeze because the rivets were so long that the pneumatic squeezer couldn't get the squeeze started. That's an odd thing about the pneumatic squeezers. Due to the geometry of the mechanism, they don't generate really high force until near the end of stroke, so sometimes (mostly on long rivets) they don't have enough oomph to get the squeeze started.