Fuselage

Today was a split session. The first 2 hours were spent working on the Rudder Stops for the aft fuse. The rest of the time was spent starting on the center section of the fuselage.

I didn't take a bunch of pictures of the fabrication process. It's the usual stuff... cutting and deburring the aluminum angle for these parts, measuring and drilling the first hole, cleco it in place, back-drill the rest of the holes, take it off and deburr the holes, prime the contact surfaces, rivet it in place. Two hours from start to finish, and here they are. These serve as stops to limit the travel of the rudder. Above, the left one. Below, the right side.

Blurry picture, but here's a shot from the back side showing both of them. This finishes the aft fuse (for now). Time to move on to the center section!

The first thing is to fabricate the 4 spacers seen on the right above, the F-916C spacers. Then I located the two F-716B plates and peeled the vinyl off and deburred the sharp edges. In the drawing above, at the bottom, you can see what comes next. I have to enlarge the center holes on 4 of the seat ribs, to allow room for the control pushrods assembly to work.

This involved using my least-favorite tool; my fly-cutter. I carefully set up the drill press and the fly-cutter to cut 1-1/2" holes.

I actually screwed the rib down to a piece of scrap wood through the pilot holes in the rib. Then I was able to clamp the wood piece down to the table on the drill press. This held it securely for the drilling.

By clamping the rib down and going slow, this worked out just fine.

Here are the 4 ribs with holes drilled, before cutting out the rest of the material to enlarge the hole. I used my tin snips to rough-cut the material out, and then smoothed it out with filing, sanding wheel on my dremmel tool, and scotchbrite wheel on the die grinder.

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