Three trips to the hardware store today. The first was to Ace to get a thread tap to make a threaded hole in the bellcrannk faces. Those are done. They’re for translating control inputs from the inside part of the wing to the outside, and they’re pretty nifty. Remeber the wings fold up. There’s a outboard set of paddles and an inbourd set of paddles. They lines up with eachother on a swivel. When one rotates, it pushes the other making it rotate. See the first pic.

The debacle. Sonex includes two Super Simple Dimple Dies in the kit to dimple surfaces for flush rivets. There’a big one for 1/8” holes and small one for 3/32” holes. Basically they are two plates of hard metal. When you squeeze them together tightly with the sheet metal in the middle, they bend a little dimple in the sheet.

Each set comes with two nails that go through the center so that you can pull them together with a rivet puller. The small set has skinny nails, understandably. The first one broke on the first hole I dimpled. It’s a lot of force required to bend the metal. The second got me 6 more dimples and broke on the 7th. But it allowed me to finish the wheel pants connectors. Today I had to dimple the tail mount to install some bolt plates, but I was out of skinny nails; specifically 4D-2” nails. Earlier in the week I checked at the local Ace and they didn’t have any. This moring I called Fountain Hill’s Ace and they told me they had two boxes in stock. So I went over there (2nd trip of the day), but they didn’t have them. The guys at the store concluded that their manufactureer just didn’t make 4D-2” nails, at all.

We found some music wire that was the right diameter and is really strong, figuring we could bend a head on one end and cut it to length. I got home and tried it out, several times. It didn’t work. The wire, strong as it was, would bend, or snap at the point where I bent a head on it. My 3rd trip was to Home Depot to see if they had the 4D-2” nails. They didn’t. I bought a high temp map blow torch insted. This allowed me to play blacksmith, hammering the hot wire against my vice making very creative bends. They all snapped off. Then I tried the simplest thing. With red hot wire tip, I just smashed it flat. That worked. whew! You can see all the attempts and the dimple dies in the second pic.

The third pic is the application of the dimples to attach those nut plates.

Bellcranks Nail Fails Tail Mount