Hey AdSala;

It was a learning experience for me as well. When I removed the backing on my metal I removed bothe equally. Either had my son hold one end or I stuck it between my lips. I then seperated the paper from the aluminum, one in each hand and pulled up as much as down. In this way I got rid of minute wrinkles that some times appeared. I don't know if this made any sense.

As far as burnishing goes..... I found no one tool was best. For hard surfaces such as a heavy resin area around the fillets one could use a hard tool such as rounded hard wood ( to avoid scratches) or even metal. If the surface was hard enough, the aluminum I was using you could even remove an overlaping wrinkle.
Soft surfaces needed extra care as I could not use lots of pressure to burnish them. I found a soft rounded piece of balsa worked well. I found only four area's that gave me any trouble. The belly was one with it's large rounded suface in two directions.

Rivets. I have 5 different rivets on the plane. Some were made with a round tube, the slot was added after. This was time consuming but I did not have a lot of those to do or justify making a tool. The flush rivets were done with a home made tool that looks like what the seamstresses use for making or tracing their patterns. A round wheel with small diameter wire soldered in spaces the same distance as the real plane(scale wise). This gave a nice crisp round rivet