Fuselage

Well, I continued solo riveting today on the bottom skin. It takes me a lot longer doing it solo, because I am very careful to position the bucking bar and rivet gun for each rivet before pulling the trigger. However, I managed to get all the rest of the bottom skin riveted on.

Wow, no more clecoes! Lookin' good. Time to flip this back over.

UPDATE: April 6, 2009. I came back to this page to insert a note about a HUGE mistake I made when riveting this together. If you're getting ready to rivet your center section skin on, don't do what I did. Whatever you do, don't do any of the rivets on either half of the F-704 bulkhead. I left the rivets open on the forward half, as seen above, knowing that the forward bottom skin joins up here. But I didn't study carefully enough to realize that the aft end of the forward bottom skin overlaps far enough to attach to BOTH F-704 bulkhead halves, including the aft half. So now I have 47 rivets to carefully drill out. Hopefully I won't do any damage to the bulkhead flange underneath the skin. Almost all the mistakes I have made on the fuselage have been as a result of not studying the drawings closely enough. Time spent studying the drawings is NOT wasted time!

Flipped upright, sitting on the workbench again. I was surprised at how light it is. It feels good to have it done to this point. The plans say now is the time to cleco the seat floors and baggage floors and drill them to the ribs, but I've already done that. So the next step will be to fit and drill the outer F-715 seat ribs.

I brought out the seat floors and baggage floors and laid them on the structure, just to see how it all looks. Couldn't resist.

In the next day or two, I should be ready to join this to the aft fuse! I'm going to have to rearrange my shop to make room.

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