AftFuselage

Drove to the airport (N57) this morning to check out the projects in the EAA Chapter 240 hangar: Glenn is getting to the end and has an engine bolted onto his Glastar. He was doing work on the electric system. Bob and John were working on the bagagedoor of the Tri-Pacer. That project is pretty much coming along since I last saw it! Chuck wasn't there, but his plane is looking nicer every time I see it. Big fuselage!

Today I finished the fuselage riveting work. I could finish this alone because my arms are long enough :-)

This things without the cleco's is pretty light now.

Adriana finally had some time to to help today: we riveted the bottom skins to the bulkheads (not the front bulkhead) and the bottom skins to the side skins. Tomorrow I'll rivet the sides to the stiffeners and bulkhead sides.

Martin Luther King today and my company gave me a day off so another good day in the shop. Deburred, dimpled and primed all the stiffeners (J-channels) and cleco'd the aft fuse together again.

After making sure again that the fuse was straight I started to rivet the 712 and 711 bulkheads to the skins and stiffeners. That lonely cleco you see in the image is where the rudder stops are going to be attached later.

This is definitely going to take a while! Also need a bucking partner for this I am sure...

Lots of deburring, dimpling and priming today. Here are the side skins and the think aft bottom skin:

And here is the bottom skin. I decided to fully prime the inside of the skin as water might get in there later. Where the side skins overlap with the bottom side I also primed the outside.

I did decide to drill some of the rivet holes out to #30 as they had been quite enlarged due to the bad fit of the tail pieces (bottom row in the image below). I'll put larger AN4 rivets in there.

Tomorrow I will debur and prime the stiffeners and then the aft fuse can go together again!

Finished the rudder stops and stowed them away for the moment. Dismantled the aft fuselage, took the blue protective plastic off and started deburring skins.

Finished match-drilling the skins to the bulkheads and started to prepare the rudder stops.

Match-drilled all the J-channels to the skins and bulkhead tonight and started reaming the remaining holes in preparation for deburring and dimpling. Had a tough time getting the right side of the 711 bulkhead flanges to line up with the holes in the skin.

More aft fuselage work tonight. I trimmed the ends of the J-channels to match the 711 and 712 bulkheads and clecod the fuse together again including the 710, 711 and 712 bulkheads and 733 skin (of which I bend the edges a bit more to get a better fit.

After that I clecod the 706 bulkhead back in and made sure that the structure was straight (plumb bob and digital level).

Since it was getting late, I drilled the right side stiffeners using the skin holes as a template. Did every 5 holes as per the plan and will finish drilling tomorrow.

Since I didn't feel like bending longerons today, I decided to go ahead and start put the aft fuselage together. This turned out a good motivator: it's real nice to have this big structure standing around in the workshop :-) Started with cleco'ing the 711 and 712 bulkheads to the 733 bottom skin. Turned out to be quite a challenge as this skin is very think.

This was followed by clecoing the 707 and 708 bulkheads to the bottom skin and putting the side skins on.

When cleco'ing the 706 bulkhead on with the bellcrank channels I noticed that the bottom holes of the bulkhead did not line up with the holes in the skins. It turned out that there was some extra space in the bellcrank assembly that I didn't see before. So I drilled out the three bottom rivets and that seemed to help as I could now cleco the skin to the bulkhead. With the rivets in there I riveted the three AN4-4 rivets again and things looked still fine. Problem solved I guess!

Last but not least, I cut the 4 J-channels to size and trimmed the front to match with the 706 bulkhead. I'll do the back tomorrow. Here is a nice picture of the complete fuselage.