RTFM? Not me! I'm a WTOS kind of guy

Well, it's started. My back yard was covered with frost this morning, thus marking the official beginning of cold-weather shop work. As you may remember, I built the tail cone in the dead of winter so it's not as if I've never had to work under those conditions before, but one kind of deacclimatizes over the intervening months. Granted, the tail cone was assembled in temperatures measured in single digits and it was a comparatively balmy 34 degrees this morning, but it was still a bit of a shock to find my cold, stiff fingers fumbling around trying to get a grip on a rivet.

First things first, though. There were a couple of things to take care of before diving into the job of riveting on the band that surrounds the top of the firewall. First, I had to address an issue that I discovered while researching the issue left over from last time. That was, of course, the problem of the ends of the band not sitting flush against the firewall. I was looking at other build blogs to see if there was some other part that gets installed later that will press those ends down (there's not - it would have to be fixed now) when I came across a warning from one of the first group of RV-12 builders. It seems that there is a nutplate hole in each of the side skins that will align with some nutplates installed in the firewall. These holes in the skins need to be dimpled for the flush screw that will be screwed through them, but the plans never mentioned it. The guy whose blog alerted me to the issue ended up trying to dimple the hole with the nutplate already installed. Easier, I thought, for me to just go ahead and do it now.

There were actually two riveting jobs that I wanted to get done. The first was the riveting of the twenty-five nutplates that had been clecoed in around the edge of the band. Before doing that I removed the clecos from a few of the holes near the ends and bent the bands so that they would fit flush against the firewall. It was just luck that I didn't have to remove the whole thing. As I was doing that. I noticed that a lot of the nut plates and firewall flanges weren't sitting flush against the inside edge of the band.

The first few were okay and I was able to go ahead and squeeze in the rivets.

As I got to the area where the nutplates weren't sitting well, I had to enlist the aid of a third hand to hole the nutplates tight against the band as I squeezed the rivets.

Vice Grips(tm) to the rescue. Again! They're the Coast Guard of tools, I'm telling you.

The second set of rivets would hold the hinge strip in place around the other side of the band. The hinge would have to be match drilled to match the pre-drilled holes in the band. To do that, I needed to clamp it into place.

I was just finishing that up when I had a visitor. He stopped by to see how things were going with the build. One topic led to another and we eventually got around to the subject of tools. Al refers to himself as a tool junky, which may well be true, but he seems more like a pusher to me. He's constantly offering to loan me tools that I know I will quickly become addicted to and want to own for myself. Seriously, if I were to spend just one day using a pneumatic rivet squeezer I know that I'd simply have to have one of my own. I mentioned that I was quite happy with the stuff I have, and in particular I was thrilled with my band saw. Except for one little thing, I said. And that is that I often find that I have to correct for twisting of the blade as I'm making cuts. Which, you know, makes a horrid screech and makes the metal that I'm cutting quite hot.

Well, yeah, it will do that when you fail to correctly configure it. Just a few twists of a knob or two cleverly hidden at the back of the saw and there was a part of the saw that I'd never seen before dropping down out of the housing. And even if I had known about it, it wouldn't have mattered much because it was horribly out of calibration. So, off he went on a mission to fix it.

At one point I sheepishly mentioned that the instructions for the adjustments that he was making were probably right there in the owners manual that came with the saw.

"Yep. What's that thing they say in your line of work about reading the manual?" he asked.

"Oh, you mean RTFM." [language warning!]

"Yeah, that's it. Doing that might have helped."

Cornered, I was. Caught right out. Plainly in the wrong, and abjectly defenseless. Nothing to do but squirm. But then it came to me: you fight an acronym with an acronym. Kind of like fighting fire with fire, right?

"I'm more of a WTOS kind of guy," I told him.

"Hmmm. What's that mean?"

There was no way he could have known, of course, because I had just then made it up.

"Oh, that means Where's The On Switch."

Zing!

After that, match drilling and riveting the hinge strips was a bit of an anti-climax.