I'm including about an hours' worth of work done yesterday, late in the day, in todays log. Yesterday I spent about an hour working on the F-715 outer seat ribs. It involved trimming off about 1/4" of the forward edge, so it will fit inside the F-704 bulkhead. Then the deburring and fitting it into place to make sure it fits. Finally, I marked the centerline on the bottom of the flange, so I can center it in the holes in the skin for drilling later on.
UPDATE: I actually have two updates from the future to add to this page. First, I mentioned in the paragraph above that I cut 1/4" off the end of each outer seat rib. BIG MISTAKE!! You'll read in the next few pages why this was such a dumb thing to do. I was careless and acted before engaging my brain. Next, see the red arrows and comment in the picture below? When you get to this point, DO NOT rivet this line of rivets in the F-704 bulkhead! The forward skin that overlaps here covers BOTH lines of rivets, not just one. Once again, not studying the drawings enough before plowing ahead cost me a lot of time and effort. Later on I had to carefully drill out 47 rivets here before continuing on. Okay... back to the story...
Today, my son Luke called me to tell me he was available to come help me. Great! So as soon as he arrived, we got right into it. Luke shot rivets and I laid on a carpet piece underneath the structure to buck the rivets. This is Luke's first time running a rivet gun. He's a professional contractor who runs his own business and does excellent framing work, so handling tools is nothing new to him even though this is his first time to use a rivet gun. He picked it up immediately and we got on a roll. We started in the center of the structure and worked our way fore and aft and out to each side, one or two ribs at a time. By the time he had to leave, we had over half of it finished. I found I was able to reach the remaining rivets that were closer to the edge, so I started riveting solo. I got the left side all finished in the remaining time I had tonight. Luke may be able to come help me bang out the rest of it tomorrow, but if not, I'll finish it myself. It takes me a lot longer working solo, but I can get it done.
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Here are a couple shots of how far we progressed tonight. This is looking great!
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