To get started, I took inventory of all the empennage parts. There are a few parts on back order due to a service bulletin associated with the horizontal stabilizer.
I started teaching myself how to rivet by working on the practice toolbox project. It didn’t take long before my sloppy riveting made the toolbox unsalvageable. The big lesson on this project is to control the rivet gun air pressure. It didn’t take long before I was just cutting away portions of sheet metal and using that for rivet practice. By the end, I basically trashed the whole toolbox, but I’m confident I have gained the basic skills to move on to the empennage.