During this month of March Madness, we will be looking at Metal Madness. Most homebuilt airplanes these days are made up mostly of metal, which requires specific materials, tools, and techniques. The articles his month will look at different aspects of metal aircraft building, maintenance, and repair. Also, a couple of years ago, KITPLANES presented a series of videos called by Editor-at-Large Paul Dye. We will suggest a video from the series each week.

So, you caught a rivet on your airplane smoking. What to do? You see the telltale black rings around the rivet's head and a faint trail of black dust (aluminum oxide) streaming behind it. If you built your own plane, you probably know what to do about it. But, more and more homebuilt owners didn't build. Here is a good task to take advantage of the freedom offered by owning an experimental aircraft. With minimal tools and a little guidance, you can fix that rivet yourself. Dave Prizio walks us through the process. (You might want to recruit tools and oversight from that builder down the row, however, on your first replacement.)

Smoking is bad for your airplane, especially when it is the rivets that are smoking. Other kinds of smoking have their own problems, but we'll leave that for another day. Loose rivets tend to smoke-in other words leave telltale black rings around their heads and faint trails of black dust (aluminum oxide) streaming behind them. Look for these signs when you wash your plane. They can be easy to miss during a quick preflight walk around.

When rivets smoke, it means that they are loose in their holes. Sometimes not very loose, but enough to allow a little moisture and a little movement to take place around the rivets in question. The resultant corrosion produces the black "smoke" we are talking about. This problem can occur anywhere aluminum skins are riveted together.

Stop Your Rivets from Smoking

Loose rivets need to be removed and replaced. If you let them go you are compromising the structural integrity of the airplane and inviting other more destructive forms of corrosion to occur. If you catch them early and the rivet holes are not very worn, it may be possible to simply clean the holes and surrounding area and replace them. If the holes are too big for a good fit on a straight replacement, then you will need to drill the holes out and replace the old rivets with oversized rivets.