I had an interesting day. I decided to try a web cam to look inside the tail of the Cessna. As I had mentioned a few days ago, it looked like some bolt heads had sheared off. I was able to look down the tail, but I couldn't count more than five bolts on the inside on each side. I wrote that off to difficulty getting a good photo. It is pretty cramped down there. Finally, I decided to punch out the two bolt bodies and have a look for them. The picture quality wasn't so good so it was very hard to see the bolt shanks and nuts that should have been there. After two hours of fishing with a magnet and looking for the debris I expected, I decided to have another look at the holes that were left after punching out the shanks. To my amazement, they were way too small for an AN-3 bolt. What the heck? I looked at the magnetic stuff I had retrieved and found two CherryMAX rivet tails. There weren't bolts in the holes, there were rivets. I felt a little foolish for spending so much time probing and looking, but the evidence clearly indicated the holes were for rivets. It is interesting that I do an inspection each year and never noticed that those were rivets. It is not surprising because you look to make sure all the fasteners are secure but don't go back to the drawings to see which fasteners should be there. So now I just have to get a couple replacement rivets, clean up the holes and install them.
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