So you think you know what this little note is going to be about, but you’re probably wrong. My interest in owning a polished aluminum airplanes died at about the same time as I was waxing airplanes as a youth activity to raise money for flying—I was not yet old enough to solo! No…although I admire some polished airplanes, particularly the silver airliners of the Golden Age, I was glad that chemists finally figured out ow to make paint stick to aluminum so that we didn’t have to worry about maintaining a pristine aluminum surface while building.
Which brings me to the subject of this photo. The polishing I am talking about is not the airplane, it is the rivet set I use in my gun when driving rivets. I use a standard mushroom set in the gun for flush rivets, and a tungsten bucking bar on the back side (once you go tungsten, you’ll mortgage your house before you’ll go back to steel), and I usually wrap the rivet set in masking tape to reduce scratches. Here you can see the difference, however, between an unpolished set, even with tape, and a polished set. I did the leading edge rivets one day with the “weathered” set, and you can see the little halo scratches as a result. I then chucked the set up on the lathe and hit it with 180, 220, 400, 600, 1000, and finally 1500 grit paper to polish it out.
The result? The rest of the rivets that you see – the ones without the halo around them! Of course, my first thought was “Dang, I should have polished my set earlier!” But then I realized that the halos will disappear as soon as I Scotchbrite the airplane for painting in a year or two. The halos would, honestly, even go away if I was polishing, but paint is in the cards for this airplane.
I’ll just have to look at the halos until then.
