Today is the day. Finally another milestone !
Hugo came over to give me a hand on the final rivetting tasks on the fuselage.
Due to the primer thickness, I often have to use longer size rivets and for the rivets holding the firewall steel engine support brackets, I had to use -8 rivets.
As Vans doesn't use these a lot in the design, I ran out of stock and Hugo was kind enough to bring some of his so we could complete the side skin rivetting to the steel brackets.
Next we completed the bottom line (top in picture) of AN470 rivets on the outer seat ribs. A regular rivetting set doesn't work here and I needed an extended universet set for the rivet gun.
As I didn't have such a set, I borrowed Hugo's.
Final job was to rivet the baggage ribs to the F706 bulkhead.
This was harder than expected. Most of these had to be shot and we needed to use the offset rivet set which is always a pain in the ass.
Left side outside ribs:
Inner centerribs
Right side outside ribs:
center ribs shop side. These were very difficult to set.
I also still need to rivet the longeron but that's easier with the squeezer once it's in the upside position.
And then finally we reached a new chapter in the manual with the title "Rolling over the 'canoe'"
Last view upside down.
And then Cindy and Hugo helped me to roll it over on the belly.
As champaign is for the final step, we decided to celebrate this event with a cone of ice cream
Next, I will construct some "legs" for the plane and level it.