Finishing up section 28 I enlist the help of my friend and his father to help get the last few steps done. Per my last post, they were EXTREMELY helpful in moving my wings to storage, then we all returned to the garage and they helped me knock out the some of the heavy lifting to join the fuse and move it to the cradle.
Before I got my camera rolling, we finished riveting the forward bottom skin to the tunnel. Next we installed the forward spar and installed all the bolts called out in the plans. (PROTIP: Now is the time to torque and apply torque seal to all your bolts on both the forward and rear spars! Also jump ahead to Section 44-2 and install the K-1100-08 nutplate between the spars now. )
One item to note is that I decided NOT to install the flowscan or fuel filter brackets as I am expecting to install an EFII system. I’ll go into this system in a future post as I have more information that I can share.
With both halves ready, we then joined the forward and rear halves and began to install some temporary bolts (Home Depot brand. I’m saving the AN hardware for installing the wings!). With the halves bolted together, we easily move the fuse to the cradle. Plenty of room now that the wings are in storage!
I believe it was at this point I realized that I hadn’t torqued down my bolts, or installed the nutplate. Ended up getting a neighbor to help me move the fuse back to the tables to fix my issue. Then they helped me move it back to the cradle once I fixed my minor issues.
Once on the cradle, I began to spend my time crawling on the floor to install clecos and taping flush rivets into place. My wife who is now becoming an expert with flush rivets, helped me over the course of a few weeks to rivet the skins to the spars. I will say that this was not an easy task. I used just about every bucking bar I had, and even then was not happy with some of the results. Honestly for the “hard to reach” rivets the BEST results were obtained with indirect riveting. (Similar to what I did for the Elevator – Part 9). I had a purchased this bucking bar from YardStore to get into really tight spots. Basically use a backrivet bucking bar on the skin side, and the angle bar on the shop head. Then use the rivet gun on the angle bar to indirectly set the rivet. It sounds funky, but it does work.
With the “Hard” stuff done, I move onto fabricating the seat pans. Cutting the angle aluminum I realize that I made a mental error and cut one too short. Another example of why ordering a few extra sticks of angle aluminum with your wings/fuse is such a good idea! Poor Jason Ellis learned that the hard way 🙁
Beyond measuring correctly, everything else goes together pretty easily. Just have to mark everything as L or R and make sure you visualize how everything goes together (mirror of each other).
Once those are done, it’s onto the landing gear assembly. My right side landing gear needed me to modify the bulkheads a little to get everything to fit without any interference. I took my time to file and deburr with scotchbright. Didn’t want to remove too much material!
With everything fitting correctly, I drill the last few holes and close out the chapter.