I'm going to go through pretty much my entire arsenal of aircraft tools. I'll identify what each one is used for, where I got it (i.e. in the Avery kit or separate), how much it cost, etc. This is aimed at new builders (like I was just a short time ago) who need more information than the stupid catalogs provide. FYI, the prices quoted for stuff in the Avery kit were 10% discounted, purchased in 2001. NOTE: I am not trying to endorse any manufacturers or vendors. Prices reflect the cost at the point in time when I purchased them. These are not advertisements. Ok, enough disclaimer...
One last thing before we dive in...here's a list of links to the tool vendors which I have used, seen, or heard of:
These are the Wiss left (green) and right (red) offset metal snips (Avery kit, $19 each). Depending on the direction in which you're cutting and the orientation of the material, you'll need one or the other. I'm pretty sure you can get left/right snips for much cheaper if you don't go with the Avery kit.
From left to right... Fluting pliers (Avery kit, $27) are used to make little crimps in various flanges. This is done to straighten the component. Ribs come pre-formed and tend to be badly bowed until you flute the flanges. This particular type of tool is a modified Vise Grip. The Vise Grip dimpler (Avery kit, $29) is used to dimple countersink material where you can't otherwise get a conventional hand or pneumatic squeezer. This type of dimpler is painful to use repeatedly...Vise Grips weren't designed for this, but it's a neat adaptation. I pretty much only use it in bent trailing edges of control surface skins and ribs. The hand seamer (Avery kit, $27) is also a modified Vise Grip. It is used to straighten or bend flanges or just about anything. Pretty wide range of uses. These modified Vise Grip tools are pretty ingenious designs, but they're definitely not the most ergonomical of tools. If you don't mind spending a little more money, you can get higher quality stuff than this. But it's nice that they come in the kit so you don't have to worry about it.
Here's the core of the drilling tools which come with the Avery kit. You've got the Sioux ¼" 3600 RPM air drill (Avery kit, $203), a whole slew of drill bits (Avery kit, about $50 total), a set of 3/32" and 1/8" drive pin punches (Avery kit, $8), the micro-stop countersink cage (Avery kit, $23), and a drill stop set (Avery kit, $8), pictured on four of the drill bits. This air drill is great. It's light, very responsive, and fairly quiet. You will use every single drill bit in this kit and more. The kit comes with a whole mess of #40 and #30 cobalt jobber bits, as well as a handful of odd sizes, plus those two 12"-long bits (which you actually will use). The drill stops are great, because not only do they limit the drill depth (so you don't go plunging into a spar or something), but they also provide instantaneous recognition of bit size by color, saving a ton of time. Need a #30? Go for copper. #40? Silver. etc. The micro-stop cage is used to set a very specific cut depth when machine countersinking material (see countersink cutters somewhere below). The rule is that anything thicker than 0.040" should not be dimpled, and you need to machine countersink. My only reservation about this sucker is that the version that comes with the kit doesn't have ball bearings, and it gets very hot fairly quickly. I've been putting off spending the $30 or so to upgrade to a ball bearing version...just been keeping this one lubed and giving it time to cool off every so often. If you have the option up front, upgrade to the ball bearing version, no doubt.
The Avery kit also came with this, the tight fit 90-degree angle drill kit (Avery kit, $44). I didn't use this at all on the empennage, and I wondered why Avery put it in the kit...but on the wings I used it all the time. It's very helpful. It came with an assortment of threaded shank drill bits of various lengths and sizes.
These are two Unibit drill bits (about $20 each), which are used to enlarge holes. The smaller of the two ranges from 1/8" to 1/2", and the larger one ranges from 3/16" to 7/8". Unibits are awesome. They produce very smooth hole enlargements. They're expensive but they're worth it.
This is a large rivet fan spacing tool (Avery Tools, $42). This comes in incredibly handy when you need to measure out a rivet pattern on some odd-length piece of material. Screw measuring and calculating. Just fan this sucker out and mark the holes. Done deal. They make a small and large version. I'd go with the small version if I had to do it again. It's $10 cheaper and I don't recall ever having to measure out any more than about 8 holes at once. These new match-drilled kits preclude the need. But if you need to measure out wing rib holes or something like that, go with the large one.
After you've drilled through your material, in order to hold things together you can use temporary fasteners like these 3/32" (#40) clecos (Avery kit, 325 for $111), 5/32" (#20) clecos (Avery kit, 20 for $7), 1/2" gap, 1/2" and 1" reach clamps (Avery kit, 5 of each for about $21), and 1/8" (#30) clecos (Avery kit, 175 for $60). You use cleco pliers (Avery kit, $6) to actuate them. On the top right are four spring tension clamps (Avery Tools, 4 for $30), which I ordered by accident...but they have come in very handy! Remarkably, 325 #40 clecos fell way short of the number I needed to complete the wings. I think I ended up ordering about 150-200 more. Van's sells them for about 32 cents each or something like that. Plus I ended up getting some 3/16" clecos as well for a few rare applications. The white plastic holders are about $6 each from Aircraft Spruce. If you've got the time, you could probably make your own out of aluminum for next to nothing. I also have a couple of plastic gallon milk jugs which I cut large holes in (near the top, keeping the handle) which I use to store clecos as well.
A necessary evil in building a metal aircraft is deburring literally everything. If you don't debur stuff you run the risk of a stress crack forming. By smoothing everything out you mitigate that risk, not to mention improving the fit. The blue handled tool is the speed debur & countersink tool (Avery kit, $21), which takes a male threaded countersink cutter. I'm pretty sure it came with the long extension pictured at the top. That's very helpful for reaching through a wing skeleton, for example, to debur the insides of rib flanges. Something else I wanted to save time is the hex adapter for deburring/countersinking (Avery Tools, $11), pictured in the middle, which mounts in a cordless screwdriver and takes male threaded countersink cutters. It makes deburring much quicker when you can just let the cordless screwdriver do the work. It only takes about one turn and the hole is done.
The yellow handle tool is the royal multi-burr tool (Avery kit, $12), which comes with five differently cut blades. This is useful for deburring edges (although I don't use it for that) but is best for deburring the edges of large holes, like lightening or bushing holes. I honestly don't really know the differences between the blades. I just played around with them until I found one that seemed to work best. Don't ask me.
This is one type of hand squeezer (Avery kit, $82 without a yoke). This is used for squeezing rivets (typically preferable in my book to shooting and bucking) whenever you have access, as well as squeezing dimple countersinks. The steel yoke (the black part) is removable and interchangeable. They make various sizes and shapes of yokes (more on that below). I bought the quick change yoke pins (Avery Tools, $5) for this sucker (and the pneumatic squeezer) to speed up the process of changing yokes, which you have to do somewhat often. This hand squeezer, while more ergonomic than Spruce's, is still kind of awkward. The handles open up very wide when the set is bottomed out. It's really a two-hand tool.
This is the pneumatic squeezer (Avery Tools, $415 with 3" yoke pictured). I believe this is made by Chicago Pneumatic. This is probably my absolute favorite tool. I think I use this sucker more than any other tool. It's worth its weight in gold for the pain and time that it saves. Wow, $400 is a lot to spend on a squeezer? Yeah, well, we'll see what tune you're singing when you've got bad carpal tunnel syndrome. This pneumatic puppy is the shiznit. The yokes are interchangeable with Avery's hand squeezer. It's heavy, and maybe after 200 dimples your arm will get tired of holding it...but I guarantee that the pain will be one millionth of what it would be if you squeezed everything by hand. Get one of these. Hands down.
I have three interchangeable yokes, two of which I had to order in addition to the kit. On the left is the no-hole/thin nose yoke (Avery tools, $140). $140 for a yoke?! Yep, get used to it. And you pretty much absolutely need it if you want to avoid putting pop rivets in those tough-to-get-at spots. This yoke doesn't have a die hole in the top half, and it tapers down nice and thin. This is useful on trailing edges of control surfaces where you can't get any other type of squeezer yoke or bucking bar. The yoke on the right is the longeron yoke (Avery Tools, $135). Yep, another $135 bites the dust. But this one is also a necessary evil. This yoke can reach around flanges and all sorts of stuff in order to provide squeezability. Very helpful yoke.
Here's a shot of a modification I had to make to my standard 3" squeezer yoke. I ground down nearly ¼" of the tip of the yoke so that it will fit in some tight places, specifically when there are obstructions like rivet heads getting in the way. You might find you have to do this, too...
This is the Tatco hand rivet squeezer (Brown Aviation Tool Supply, $125). When I first ordered the Avery kit, they had no Avery hand squeezers in stock (weird, huh?) so they shipped me this Tatco squeezer as a loaner. I had used the Tatco before in the SportAir workshop, and I agreed with what I was told, which was that the Tatco is a far superior squeezer in terms of ergonomics. It really is much, much easier on your wrists. So I decided to keep this one. It's expensive, but it's worth it if you have to do a lot of hand squeezing...which I don't since I have the pneumatic squeezer. Plus, this sucker takes proprietary yokes that are a bitch to change (since you need to punch out the pins...no quick release pins or anything). There's really no point in having a Tatco if you're going to have a pneumatic squeezer. It's just wasted money. But I do have this one, and I do use it.
This is the C-frame rivet/dimple tool (Avery kit, $131), which I use primarily for dimple countersinking holes in skins. As I mentioned, squeezing is my preferred method of dimpling and riveting, but there's no way to use a squeezer to dimple holes well beyond the reach of the yoke. That's where this tool comes into play. You put typical dimple dies on this sucker, slide the skin under, hold the set down (it's spring loaded upward), pushing the dimple die into the hole, and hammer down on the top a couple of times. I use a 1 ½ pound dead-blow hammer (seen somewhere below) for this. You can also use the C-frame for riveting, although I've never found an excuse for doing that. I think in the "old" days when you had to build your own spar, using this sucker with a sledge hammer on those 3/16" rivets was the way to do it. Also pictured here is an extension (the short thing on the right), which raises up the bottom set about an inch and a half, and also the rivet gun set, which you would use in place of the set which has the die hole. Like I said, I haven't found a case where I needed to use the C-frame like that yet.
In the wood block are the set of spring back dimple dies (Avery kit, about $120), squeezer sets (Avery kit, $36), and countersink cutters (Avery kit, about $25). I've also got a few additional items here, like a few different sizes of squeezer sets, a couple different types of rivet shavers (Avery Tools, about $20), and some countersink cutters for use on fiberglass parts. The four rows of sets on the left can all be used in just about any hand squeezer, pneumatic squeezer, and also the C-frame. The countersink cutters and rivet shavers have threaded shafts. They can be used in a micro-stop cage (seen somewhere below) or in a female threaded shaft with any old drill.
Here's the Avery 3x rivet gun (Avery kit, $158), the back riveting set (Avery kit, $17), flush swivel head rivet set (Avery kit, $32), straight 1/8" rivet set (Avery kit, $7), double offset 1/8" rivet set (Avery kit, $16), and a 10-degree single offset 1/8" rivet set (Aircraft Spruce, $8). If you're not squeezing a rivet, you're shooting it in some form or another. The back rivet set forms a shop head with the skin and flush rivet placed against a back riveting plate (see somewhere below). The flush swivel head set is used 99% of the time when riveting skins. The swivel is nice but builds bad habits...it allows the rivet gun to stray from perfectly perpendicular and still transfers the force directly. The other three 1/8" rivet sets are used on the round "universal head" rivets. The offsets are necessary in lots of places where you can't get the gun square to the rivet due to a rib or some other structure in the way.
Here's another modification I had to make. This is the double offset 1/8" rivet set. I had to grind off most of one side so that this set would get close enough to the wing ribs to shoot the leading edge rib rivets through the spar. Pain in the butt, and a shame to do this to a tool.
These are the 1-pound bucking bar (Avery kit, $15), 2-pound bucking bar (Avery kit, $17), and 2.5-pound bucking bar (Avery kit, $22). I'm not actually sure which is which. I believe the one on the right is the lightest, and the one in the middle is the heaviest. Each bucking bar has one or more smooth surface which is held up against the back of a rivet while it is being shot. The concept is like the swinging balls thing...a ball on the end hits the other balls, and nothing moves except the ball on the other end. Shooting and bucking rivets is exactly like that. The energy gets transferred from the source (the rivet gun) through a medium (the rivet) to the receiver (the bucking bar). The rivet itself is like the middle balls. The gun is on one end, and the bucking bar is on the other. The gun impacts the rivet, which sends the impulse to the bucking bar, which actually bounces off the rivet and "swings" back at it (by virtue of the person holding it firmly in place), smashing the rivet in turn. This happens many times per second (depending on air pressure and trigger operation), smashing the rivet into oblivion...of course in a controlled fashion. The only skill required when bucking rivets is holding the bucking bar stable and square to the rivet. Other than that, you let physics do the work. You don't have to push on the rivet, just hold that sucker steady. That's it. FYI, the duct tape on the bucking bars is my way of keeping parts from getting scratched. For example, if you're bucking rivets along a wing rib that's been nicely primed, just wrap the corners of your bucking bar with duct tape and you won't gouge the rib or scrape away the primer.
How do you know if a shop head is perfect? These four shop head rivet gauges (Avery kit, $13) tell you. There's one for each rivet diameter. The basic rule according to Mil-Spec MIL-R-47196A is that a driven shop head should have a diameter of 1.5x the starting diameter, and it should have a driven height of half the starting diameter. Each of these gauges has two points of measurement...the hole on the left side reflects the proper driven head diameter, and the little indentation on the right side reflects the proper driven head height. Don't take my word for it, but here's my interpretation on how to use these gauges...after the rivet is shot, the round hole should not fit over the head. It should be just shy. The other end of the gauge should not slide over the head. The hole checks for too little, and the cutout checks for too much, so to speak (thanks Jim Daniels for coming up with a good explanation). Apparently these gauges are very conservative.
The gauge on the right is a rivet length gauge (Avery kit, $5). This is used to determine the proper length rivet for an application where you might not have a specific rivet callout on the plans. There are four cutouts, one for each of the common rivet diameters. The height of each cutout is how far out of the material the rivet should stand before being driven. (For more info on riveting, read this)
This is the steel back riveting plate (Avery Tools, $32). I can't believe this didn't come with the Avery kit. You can probably get a slab of smooth steel for much less money if you look around for it. This is used for back riveting. Basically you lay a skin down on this, with a flush rivet pointing upward (flush head down), and you use the rivet gun with a spring-loaded back riveting set to form the shop head. This is, in my opinion, the second easiest form of riveting. Like squeezing, it only takes one person (no shooting/bucking), and it goes very quickly.
When you absolutely can't install a solid rivet, or when you just want to rivet something non-structural in a non-visible place, you use blind rivets (there are also structural blind rivets, don't get me wrong). This is the 360-degree swivel pop rivet puller (Avery kit, $26). The swivel head is very useful depending on the angle you need to come at it from.
Here's my set of files. There's really only one file here that counts, and that's the Vixen file (Avery kit, $22). That sucker eats through metal. It's not a "finish work" file by any stretch. It makes the rough work go more quickly. The other files are a cheap $10 set I got from Harbor Freight. I'm sure a quality set of files would be better, but these work fine for me. I also purchased a decent set of needle files (not pictured), which have come in handy, although they're not really needed other than in a pinch.
This is a cheap air die grinder (Harbor Freight, $14). I have various attachments for this thing, including the sanding roloc wheel (mounted), a 3M deburring flap-style wheel, a cutoff disc mandrel, a nylon bristle brush (used for scouring fuel tank mating surfaces), and a smaller 3M roloc style wheel with Scotch Brite polishing discs of various "grit." The one downside to the air die grinder is that it chews through air. When running this sucker my compressor is going just about constantly. Another thing to consider is whether you want a straight or 90-degree angle grinder. Get both, they're cheap. I've gotten by with just this straight one.
This is the Central Machinery 12" variable speed band saw (Harbor Freight, on sale for $99). I can't believe I got through the empennage and wings without this sucker. Now that the fuselage is underway, I find I'm doing a lot more fabrication. This sucker has come in handy. I did a lot of research and deliberation, thinking that I'd need a saw capable of cutting slowly and using specifically a metal cutting blade. Don't even bother wasting your time. For steel, yeah, you might need that, but for aluminum you can use the standard 6 tooth-per-inch blade at high speed and it cuts through, as the cliche says, like butter.
This is a Chicago 6" cut-off saw (Harbor Freight, on sale for $35). This is something that is invaluable for the fuselage fabrication tasks. It just chops right through angle stock. For 35 bucks, it's worth every penny. The way I see it, if the cut is less than 12", I can use my band saw. But if the cut is either longer than that, or if you'd end up swinging around several feet of angle stock when trying to hold it up to the band saw, no sense in messing around...just use the cutoff saw. I got this just as I started the fuselage work, which is about when you really start needing to cut lots of angles.
Here are the aluminum oxide 6" cut-off wheels (Harbor Freight, $4.99 for a 3-pack). These are what you use on the cut-off saw pictured above.
This is my Central Machinery bench top drill press (Harbor Freight, $55). This particular model has a keyless chuck, which I really don't like, but it works fine. It was another $20 or so for a keyed chuck. Lots of people have debated about whether to go with a standing floor drill press or a bench top model. I like the bench top model because you can put it wherever you need it. Despite being able to use a conventional handheld drill for most applications, there are definitely lots of cases where a drill press does a much, much better job. For example, if you need to drill a series of aligned holes in a part, you can clamp down a "fence" of sorts and be ensured that each hole has a consistent edge distance, and that each hole is perfectly straight through...no angles to allow rivets to sidle over or whatever. Recently I drilled the aileron pushrods, and I can't imagine trying to do that without a drill press.
This is an absolutely invaluable tool...this is Central Machinery 6" bench grinder (Harbor Freight, $35). I took the coarse stone wheel off and mounted the 6" Scotch Brite cutting & polishing wheel (Avery kit, $43). That Scotch Brite wheel rocks the house. I've heard about people mounting them horizontally in a drill press, but I don't believe it will spin as fast as in a bench grinder. It makes very quick work of deburring edges, shaping parts, etc. Any sort of fabrication undoubtedly involves using the Scotch Brite wheel. And surprisingly, it doesn't wear down that quickly. I've got a year and several hundred hours of construction on mine (empennage and wings), and it looks like it'll last through the rest of the construction no problem.
Something I went without for a long time was this Dremel MultiPro Rotary Tool ($69, Orchard Supply Hardware). There are several imitations, but this thing rocks. It has the best speed range and variable control, and it has the best feel in my opinion. It came with a whole slew of attachments, but I ended up getting more heavy-duty cutoff wheels and a bunch of sanding drums. This thing cuts, deburs, sands, polishes, etc. Best of all, it's electric, so it's a relatively quiet alternative to using the air-intensive die grinder, especially at night!
I've barely scratched the surface on electrical work, but the two tools which I currently have are the ratcheting terminal crimper (Cleaveland Tools, $36) and the automatic wire stripper (Cleaveland Tools, $21). The stripper is the coolest design...it really is automatic. Very effortless to strip wire. But don't pay full price for it. I'm pretty sure Harbor Freight has one for like 9 bucks or something. I've definitely seen them cheaper, even at local auto parts stores. Live and learn...
This is a tubing bender (Cleaveland Tool, $34) which handles bending 1/4", 5/16", and 3/8" tubing. 1/4" is most common for fuel vent lines and pitot tubing, and 3/8" tubing is what's used for fuel supply plumbing. This tool gauges precise bends. Pretty simple. Same deal, though...don't pay full price. You can get one at Home Depot or Harbor Freight or wherever for many fewer clams.
This is a very, very cool tool. It's the Parker Rolo-Flair tube flaring tool (Aircraft Tool Supply, $65). It will precisely apply a 37-degree flare to tubing of nine different sizes, ranging from 1/8" on up. Flaring the end of tubing prevents it from pulling out of an AN fitting when under tension, and helps promote a better seal. There are cheaper flaring tools, but they don't flare both the inside and outside of the tubing. This style does. DO NOT use a general or automotive flaring tool...it undoubtedly makes 45-degree flares. Not good! All aircraft fittings are 37 degrees. Don't ask me why.
This is a 40-piece tungsten alloy SAE tap & die set (Harbor Freight, $25). Also pictured here is a stick of Boelube (Cleaveland Tools, $3), which is an invaluable multi-purpose thread lubricant. Not only does it lube threads, it's great for tapping, drilling, etc. Any sort of metal on metal application, and Boelube rocks.
I recently acquired this little handy doodad. It's an electric engraver (Harbor Freight, $10). For the longest time, whenever I needed to mark parts before priming them, I would use a hammer and punch to make light scribe marks. Sometimes you've got parts to prime which would otherwise be identical, and the light punch marks (usually in the shape of letters, "R" or "L", numbers, whatever scheme you want) come through even after a coat of primer, so you can identify the parts when it's time to assemble them. Anyway, the punch and hammer thing got old and annoying, so I spent the ten bucks and got this electric engraver. It's basically a vibrating pencil...just "write" your marks right onto the parts. Works great.
This is my cheap touch-up sprayer (Harbor Freight, $21) which I use to prime parts.
This is a Craftsman inch-pounds torque wrench (Sears, $70). Every nut and bolt on an aircraft must be properly torqued. The funny thing is that the torque for aircraft AN bolts is extremely low...on the order of 20-25 inch-pounds for most applications. That's about 2 foot-pounds! So you need a torque wrench which works with inch-pounds.
This is a fly cutter (Home Depot, $8 or so) which I use to cut holes larger than my Unibits. I always use this sucker in my drill press (I can't imagine doing anything else).
Hack saws...yeah, everybody has one. I still haven't discovered the perfect blade yet. I'm looking for something that cuts through aluminum angle like butter. Lately I just use the cutoff wheel on my die grinder.
Hammers...I've got a few different types for different stuff. Do I really need to go into this?
The 12" steel rule (Avery kit, $11) is what I most commonly use for measuring.
I've got a box of Scotch Brite 7447 hand pads (Avery Tools, $1.50 each or $25 for a box of 20). These pads give you the finishing touches on metal parts that you've just filed or cut. They're finer than sandpaper. I also have a bunch of emery cloth, which is a slightly coarser grit, plus a bunch of run-of-the-mill sandpaper of varying grits. I don't use sandpaper very often. Scotch Brite is the pad of choice.
I've got your typical slew of safety equipment. I use the 3M hearing protectors when riveting, hammering on the C-frame, and often when doing grinding/deburring if it gets loud. The respirator comes in handy when working with MEK or other chemicals (like Proseal), or when I'm priming parts.
This is a safety wiring kit I bought from Aircraft Spruce a while back. I forget how much it cost, but it has two different size "automatic" pliers. You clamp down on the wire ends, just pull back on the silver knob, and your wire gets twisted. Couldn't be easier.
I figure I'll toss this in here for posterity...this is my air line setup. Air comes from the compressor, through a Campbell Hausfeld regulator (Home Depot, $18), a Campbell Hausfeld moisture filter (Home Depot, $16), an inline Campbell Hausfeld oil lubricator (Home Depot, $13), and then gets split out. The moisture filter is a must. You wouldn't believe how much moisture collects in there. And the inline oil vaporizer is pretty cool, too. No need to oil the air tools that get used regularly. I slapped quick disconnects between all of this stuff so I can interchange or recombine them as needed. For example, when priming, I use a dedicated "clean" hose, and I take the oiler out of the lineup.
