Of course, all of this work required drilling out every single rivet that holds these skin segments to the ribs and, of course, this also means that they also not only had to all be replaced, but because the majority of them were Olympic pop rivets, each and every one
of them had to have their little heads shaved as well....just like my own, except I get to use a razor. In fact, if you've ever used a drill attachment type rivet shaver you know that it takes almost all of your strength to keep it from walking off the head of the rivet. Because if it does...even just once....you're screwed, as it'll leave a deep scratch in that expensive piece of aluminum skin you've so carefully trimmed to fit, not to mention all the time spent re-drilling all those new rivet holes. (You might have guessed, by now, that I'm speaking from personal experience here.) So, I purchased an aircraft rivet gun, which not only turns about five times faster, but the spring action for the bit is so much lighter it takes a quarter of the pressure to keep it in place. Then, I simply took the bit that comes with the drill shaver and had it adapted permanently to the aircraft gun, along with a little collar they made up, and...vioila, no more walking problems. If you have a job this big to do you may consider doing the same thing, as it's a lot easier on the muscles as well.
Bob and Steve decided that they wanted to tackle the polishing of this beast on their own, so that part of the work isn't ours and, in fact, I've relegated that photo to the "Before" page. Regardless, the quality of the work we did is evident and, as you peruse the images below of the restoration process, keep in mind that each and every skin segment that was repaired had to be removed from the trailer, including the two, compound curved front roof caps, as well as five of the six curved skin segments on each side of the back end. In fact, all of the compound curve segments had to have the dents worked out by my master metal fabricator Mike Limasa
on an English Wheel, which is a real art in itself that I've come to highly respect.....especially, after the first person I was
using couldn't get the holes to line up again. Oh, and by the way, lest you think that we sometimes do substandard
riveting work, the crooked line of rivets along the bottom of the bathroom window was Spartan Aircraft's
doing, not ours! We simply re-riveted everything back onto the coach the way it came from the factory.
