Fuselage

I drove down to Vans yesterday afternoon and picked up a new piece of aluminum angle stock for the F-717 Forward Lower Longerons, so now I can get busy and finish them. So today I cut and fabricated new ones, making sure to make a left and right one this time, and not two left ones like a few days ago. I believe carefully marking these parts beforehand, making sure it's drawn out properly before cutting or drilling anything, will help ensure that these kind of mistakes are avoided in the future. Live and learn.

Well, after a lot of careful cutting, drilling, filing, deburring and polishing, I have two brand new F-717's. These longerons now need a bit of twist put in to them, and then they are ready to install and drill to the firewall brackets.

Once they were twisted, and carefully fitted in place, I removed them and marked the steel brackets for drilling. My method here was to mark carefully where I want the holes to be drilled for the 4 bolts that will hold the longeron to this bracket. This insures proper edge distance for the bolts on this critical part. Then I drilled #40, then enlarged to #30, and finally enlarged to #12.

Here are the finished #12 holes on the left side bracket.

Next, I carefully clamped the longeron angles in place and backdrilled through these holes with my right-angle drill. I love this tool!

Three of the four holes are now drilled in this longeron. These #12 holes need the big gold clecos. I test fitted an AN3-5A bolt to make sure the fit is right.

Perfect! Once both sides were finished, I moved the clecos to the underneath position so the bottom skin can be put on later on without bumping into them.

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