MAX Update No. 54: Mistakes, and How Not to Make Them

Reader Contribution by Staff
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I bet you think I’ve got this all figured out. Hah! I’ve been doing my problem solving on the fly, coming up with new techniques and learning from my mistakes, and boy! Have I been learning a lot, or what?

Since I don’t really mind folks laughing at me, I’m going to share a couple of recent mistakes with you.

I spent way too much time trying to get the hood working, but eventually I threw in the towel and went back to a one-piece nose. To hold the hood between the fenders while fiberglassing the parts back together, I came up with this cool system, of making strips of stiff clear plastic and riveting everything in place through the plastic, with a row of rivets in the hood, adjacent to a row of rivets in each fender. By using aluminum rivets, I could drill them out once the bonding was complete, and then just fill in the rivet holes. Aluminum is softer than the fiberglass reinforced plastics we commonly call “fiberglass” so I knew getting rid of the rivets would be easy.

The bonding back to a one piece nose went great, and the finishing went great except for the rivet removal part, which is when I discovered I’d grabbed a box of stainless steel rivets instead of aluminum rivets.

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