Time for another update on my builders blog. It's been a while again since the last update. Progress is slow but the work continues nevertheless.
In the passed weeks, we continued rivetting the bottom skin under the center fuselage section. After using 3-4 rivets on the seat ribs, I returned to the 3-3.5 as called for in the plans for the baggage ribs. These were easier to set and still gave sufficient size heads.
I found the easiest way to rivet the bottom skin to put the whole assembly on it's size resting on both bulkheads and clamping them there.
The only difficulty is rivetting the far end as the structure is rather floppy there. The picture below shows how I clamped the bottom baggage rib to the table to get some more stability and rigidity while rivetting. Also note the blue tape protection used when rivetting to protect the primer.
Hey look who showed up... wouldn't you want a rivetting partner like that every night in your workshop ? Damned, I love the summer.
Here's another shot while rivetting the baggage ribs. Nothing spectacular really.
Some sessions later, I finished the final rivets in the bottom skin with Hugo. Boy this took a while but finally got the work done and ready to move on to the next challenges.
Next step is was to deburr the seat skins and baggage cover skins. As next step will be to matchdrill them to the ribs, I installed them on the flipped over center fuselage section.
This really starts to look neat. It's still scary thinking that I'm gonna be sitting there at 10000 feet some day.
Here's a shot from the read looking forward
and one from the front looking back. The gold colored bulkhead in the front is the F704 where the wing spars fit into the fuselage.
All excited again and looking forward to the next work session.