After some business travel and a crazy week of snow here in Seattle, I finally got back to the project this weekend. It took me awhile to remember all the half completed tasks that needed finishing. So this weekend was dedicated to an assortment of small things. In no particular order:

–I made some temporary floor boards so can crawl on the inside of the fuse now.

–I finally torqued the bolts holding the 705C spacers.

–The F-728 vertical channel got riveted to the 706 bulkhead.

–I drilled the remaining holes on the F-707B bracket to attach the F-787 Stiffener rib to the 707 bulkhead.

–Lastly I drilled and dimpled the remaining gusset plates that tie the 706 and 707 bulkheads to the longerons.

This weekend I got the last two skins out of the closet for fitting. Fitting is simple enough but there’s some details to pay attention to for sure. I have to go back and tweak all the flanges for a better overall fit. They went on without much hassle after that. The J-stringers ended up being a tad too long preventing a few of the holes in the 706 falnge from lining up properly. I went ahead and drilled everything on the stringers and the flanges except for these few holes.

I have a lot of little details to pick off this week before I can put the top skins back in storage. Hopefully I can find a weather window to get some priming  done as well.

The side gussets and rails are installed next. The gusset provides the anchor for the cabin frame as well as a slot for the canopy latch. The holes were straightforward to cut. After drilling (4) 1/4″ inch holes for the radius on each corner, I filed into shape and drilled then into place with the rails and the 705 bulkhead.

Here’s the final position. I’ll need to come back and countersink the rail rivets and the middle rivets of the gusset/longergon/705G interface as the cabin frame will mount directly onto this area.

For now though, on to the forward gusset. This is a deceptively tricky fit so I’ll kinda show my step by step process if anyone might need some reference later. First the front edge needs to be trimmed to fit flush against the firewall. You can’t revmove too much though because you still need to spread 14 size -4 rivets along the long dimension.

I had to shorten the spread on the last two rivets to get everything inside the edge clearance needed after modifying the front edge of the bracket.

Next I bent the short dimension where the gusset snugs up to the firewall so that it would lay flat on the firewall angle. I also increased the bend where the gusset overlays the longeron so there would be good contact between the parts. I used my table-top break and my big bench clamp to do all the subtle bending.

Once the gusset nested nicely, I drilled #40 pilot holes for both dimensions of the gusset.

Then I opened the holes up to #32 and finished them up with a #30 reamer carefully checking the angle of the drill to keep the holes straight.

I finally got to reassemble the fuse stand I got from another builder. It’s been sitting in the corner of the garage for the last year in pieces. Now I can wheel the fuse around a bit and it’s nice and level—on to the aft deck.

There was a touch of twist that was easily corrected with the clamps. Here’s the deck all drilled with no twist. I’ll wait to rivet till I collect enough parts to prime.

I also made a couple of repairs to tabs on the bulkheads that I double drilled. My solution was to JB Weld some extra tabs on top of the originals and use a longer rivet to sandwich everything together.

Last Saturday Paul came over for our 4th rivet session on the fuse. After 7 hours we got all the rivets pounded and flipped her over. It feels great to hit such a milestone. I will also feel much better not having to crawl around the inside of the fuse. There’s a few items on the punch list to clean up this week and then I can move on to the various brackets along the longeron.

Here’s a 3/4 view of the fuse. Fun!

And the view from the inside

Lift with your legs!

Paul and I basking in our successful day. Thanks for all the riveting help P-Dub!

Another Sunday. Another visit from P Dub. In 4 hours we were able to get the sides and a lot of the bottom skin finished today.

The rear edge of the bottom skin turned our really nicely. I am going to follow Chad’s lead and fill all the overlapping gaps with proseal to keep the cockpit weather tight.

The intersection of the side, bottom and aft skins came out really nice. A little proseal to close out some gaps and we’ll be done here. I did have to drill out one rivet on the opposite side. I also used longer rivets than spec’d on a couple of the tab flanges here so a good shop head would form.

The last thing we did before knocking off was to seal and rivet the bottom firewall to the 772 skin. I used 3M Firebarrier 2000+ to guard against CO2 fumes and as protection against an engine fire.

Happy Thanksgiving everyone. My last day of freedom before work cycles up again was action packed. My wife ran her forth half marathon this morning. Go Annabelle! This afternoon, Paul headed over for another rivet party.We knocked out more of the side skins and went back to get all the interior rivets that needed to be bucked.

Here’s a couple of photos of the harder to reach rivets in the interior skeleton. The top of the 715/705 rib interface and the bottom is the aft flange of the arm rest.

The fuselage is starting to look whole with less and less clecos attached! Hopefully, we can finish out the canoe riveting with one more major push next weekend.

Don’t be fooled. I haven’t turned over the fuselage just yet. I simply flipped the photo so I could image the fuselage right side up for once. Today I took off from work and concentrated on the interior rivets I have left to complete. There’s the 18 rivets that connect 706 to the aft baggage ribs; 3 rivets connecting 707 to the bellcrank stiffener; 6 rivets for the aft arm rest and finally 4 rivets that attach the 715 ribs to the rear wing spar.

I can’t get all of these by myself. But a number of them are in very close quarters and hard to buck anyway. I am using cherry max 4-2 rivets for these holes and pulling them myself. Above you can see 3 cherry max’s used just to the left of the bellcrank support brace. Also the lower-most hole (upper in the photo)  in each of the baggage rib/706 intersections.

On the opposite side of the bellcrank supports it wasn’t as straight-forward to pull those rivets. The flange of the bellcrank stiffener overlapped the holes for the 706/baggage rib rivets so that you couldn’t get the manufactured head to seat properly. Trying to pull from the other side would be much more awkward and the resulting shop head might not sit well with the overlapping flange. So I took out the dremel and CAREFULLY scalloped out the edge of the overlapping flange so that the rivet heads sat perfectly against 706. It all turned out well in the end. I set 11 cherrymax rivets leaving 16 more to buck when Paul comes over this weekend.