After some time of traveling in Arizona and Utah, I am excited to continue working on the plane.
I started by leveling (ah it was perfect!), then drilling and prepping the fuselage deck.
Then I proceeded with the side rails: drilling, fitting and prepping for riveting
To level the fuselage, we needed to build some sawhorses that are better than the quick and dirty solution we put together to flip the canoe.
After we build the sawhorses, we started the level process. Well, we did not need to do much, it was perfect, everywhere.
We proceeded with riveting. It was lot of riveting done in few days, and the result is rewarding. Following are some pictures showing the progress. We riveted all, at the exception of the firewall, which we left until we attach the noise.
Then we flipped the canoe. This part was fun. I can not wait to sit inside the fuselage,.
October 11th, 18th, 25th, November 1st, 8th, 15th, 22nd 52h
The laundry list was long: taking everything down, deburring, smoothing the edges, dimpling, countersinking and priming.
After all this prep, it is time to rivet and put the fuselage together. So, we clikoed the fuselage, back together, we are ready for riveting.
Working on the pedals was lot of fun, some moving parts!
It took a couple days to assemble and instal the pedals, as the fitting was tricky and we wanted to enable few positions.
Then I went ahead installing the top stiffeners, the final step before bringing everything down.
The forward fuselage consisted of many small parts: stiffeners, angels, bulkhead, landing gear attachments and other small modifications. All fitted great. Following is some pictures showing the progress:
Attaching the firewall turned out to be time consuming. I had to adjust the length of the longerons many time, fit the longerons and re-do. I guess I was pretty conservative in my adjustment of the longerons length, so it took many iterations. After being happy with the fit, I started drilling the fire wall, that took some time and many drill bits, since this is drilling through steel.
We attached the second skin. Then we realized we need to detach both skin to form the bend for the intersection with bottom fuselage. Ah well, we removed both and worked on the bend. We did a bit of digging in this one and we realized that people had issues with cracks forming at the bend. So, we were very careful, sanded the edges very well before starting to bend. The bends went great.
Then we went ahead and drilled the longerons. All went great.
Attaching the mid fuselage to the aft fuselage was tricky, definitely a 2 person job. After many trials, we were able to fit the 2 together.
Afterward, I added lot of support for the fuselage, both below the 704 bulkhead, as Van suggestion, and adding a fourth support at the intersection of the mid and aft fuselage.
Then I added one of the side skins. The fuselage is growing and taking over the garage.
We finished bending the longerons. They both matched the template pretty well. Then we fitted the longerons with the aft fuselage.
Then we attempted attaching the center fuselage. Then fitting turned out to be tricked. So, we decided to leave to next week to take our time to fit and support everything well.
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