Aft fuselage cleco - 07/09/2013

Now that all is prepared, the fun part starts. It's time to assemble the aft fuselage for the first time.
I first removed some vinyl using the soldering iron on all the aft fuselage skins.

As the plans say, you start by laying the bottom skin on some supports and cleco the middle bulkheads on and slide in the J-channel stiffeners. I did the center line on the stiffeners again as I found them to be too close to the bend on my previous attempt.

Then you cleco the side skins on the two center bulkheads and slide in the F706 front bulkhead.
Then slide in the small tail skin with F711 and F712 bulkhead and add F710.

After that, it looks pretty much like the image below.

The tail section is pretty complicated. The small tail skin lays inside the front bottom skin and the side skins over lap it. 
The stiffeners sit on the inside with their flat side against the tail skin.
It took me quite a while to get them in.

 

I noticed that the flanges of the F711 and F712 don't fit nicely when the side skins are on so I will need to revisit and do some bending on the flanges to have a smoother transition between flang and skin.


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