Fuselage

Today was a great day. Now that the longerons are back in place and the aft fuse is still upright, I thought I might as well finish all the riveting in the aft fuse. It's so much easier while the fuse is upright. I can do it all solo with great results.

I know it's somewhat out of order from following the plans precisely, but why not do it now while this thing is upright? It just makes good sense. I started at the tail and finished all the riveting up the sides of the skins up to the longerons. The trickiest rivets were the ones at the very aft end, between the F-711 and F-712 bulkheads. But I got them all okay. I was able to squeeze quite a good number of them. If you look closely, I put a black sharpie mark on the blue vinyl about 8 rivets forward of the F-710 bulkhead. All the skin-to-longeron rivets aft of this point can be riveted now. Forward of this point, there are a handful of rivets that you can install now to hold the longeron in place, but the majority of them are left open. The top skins will eventually join here and be riveted to the fuse. That's why the majority of the holes are left open. Anyway, I'm very pleased with how nice this came out.

Once again, I called on Daniel to come out and give me a hand. Once again, we flipped this thing over. Then he spent some time with me joining the center section to the aft fuse for the final time. As much as I had hoped it would be much easier this time, it seemed to be just as much of a struggle as it was the first time to get it together. So after a lot of wiggling, pushing, and pulling, it finally came together.

It's really nice to see this together again. I wasn't so sure about my choice of color for the interior at first, but the more I look at it, the more I like it.

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