How many rivets are on a b1?

Answer 1

I seriously doubt anyone knows--even the manufacturer. When you spec fasteners like rivets, nails and so on, you do it in pounds. They know how many feet of riveted seam can be joined with a pound of rivets, and order 10 percent more than they need just to cover any eventualities like rivet guns jamming or having to redo some rivets. (In the really old days when they designed planes on paper, they probably just ordered a truckload of rivets, and ordered another one when they were down to a hundred boxes or so.) Worse, there's no one bill of materials for the whole plane; it would be too big and hard to work with. Look at your average large airplane. It's got two wings, two horizontal stabilizer sections, a vertical stabilizer section, a nose, a tail and a number of fuselage sections. These are big tube-shaped assemblies; they make them individually, bolt them together and rivet strips of metal over the joints to aid in airflow. So...maybe it takes a pound of rivets to make a flap, five pounds to make a fuselage plug, forty pounds to make a vertical stabilizer. Whatever it is. The team that is making the flap is going to order its parts, make the flap and turn it in to be put in the plane. There are two other problems working against you: first, airplane manufacturers don't have just one factory anymore. They don't for two reasons--it's easier to hire 10,000 workers to make airplanes if you hire 500 workers in 20 places, and it's easier to get Congressional approval for a big project if 20 Congressmen's constituents can get jobs than if only one Congressman's constituents can. (Bringing jobs to his or her area is one of the things that get Congressmen reelected.) The other reason is that airplanes aren't made by only one company anymore. In World War II, there were a lot of companies that made planes, and they made, except for things like the engines, the whole plane. Boeing had a tail shop, Douglas had one, Republic had one. Today, someone would open Tail Technologies and sell tails to all three companies. Tail Technologies runs its own bills of materials. This business is called "aerostructures." About the only part of the plane the plane factory would have to make is the wing, because they don't want their super-secret wing design showing up on their competitor's airplane. Basically, no one knows and no one cares how many rivets are on a B1, so long as there are enough.