Oh Crap Moments...

This is when riveting went wrong. The washer on the inside slipped and got wedge and so the rivet got locked into an angled position, causing it not to be flush against the surface. Solution?

Drill the whole thing back out carefully and fish all the loose items out. (Notice the holes are also misaligned, which I had to fix...) So far I've had quite a couple of such Oh-Crap-Moments, not fun...

75 Hours and counting

It is now about 50% completed(my very unscientific estimation). Everything on top of the head are still not riveted, they are just temporarily mounted together with fasteners. Even though I've already spent over a month on this, nothing is getting easier. Every pieces have their own unique challenges. For example, the last piece was the top of the head, which was very big and didn't work well with the tools I had (too big for the vise, difficult to fold ... etc). It basically covered 9 sections and has 66 drill holes... :P haha, that probably was overkill...

Antenna is done

This is what the Z currently looks like at the 60th hour mark. The antennae were not as difficult to fold as anticipated (I was afraid of bending or curving issue before, but the metal held up much better than expected! The pointy tips are much nicer than I'd hoped for). On the other hand, the diamond shaped center was very problematic. The antennae and the diamond together used up 14 rivets all in the same tiny area, and I had to drill 2 of them back out to undo mistakes. The gap/opening between the two were much wider than I had wanted, but fortunately nothing bad really stood out so I hope they don't get noticed. Hopefully none of the future pieces will get as tricky and difficult as this one (and I don't expect any), I sure hope I'm right :)