Fuselage

Things have slowed down here a bit as I spend time working on other stuff here at home. So this is a summary for the rest of the month of June. I've been working on the front deck, getting all the little parts fab'd and primed. I finished up the F-703B angle and primed it. This is the notched angle that stiffens the instrument panel. Then I deburred the panel, in preparation for drilling it. Here's a shot of some of the little parts:

The notched pieces are the F-768D seal support angles. You cut the notches and make these parts. One for the left; one for the right. The bottom piece is the seal support angle for the middle. It gets dimpled instead of notched because the curvature is only slight. I finished deburring and priming all these parts. I decided to get them ready for riveting, and maybe even rivet them together before installing stuff in the plane.

Above: Here's the F-703B angle and the smaller angle pieces on the sides, drilled and clecoed to the panel. Below is a close-up shot.

Here's the panel, seen from the front side. All clecoed up, ready for riveting.

After drilling the seal support angle to the sub-panel F-768B, I decided to go ahead and rivet it together. So I primed it all and riveted it together. This is the one for the right side. I hope I don't regret this before fitting it all together in the fuselage, but I figured why not? Fewer clecoes in the way when it all goes together. And it's done.

So next, it was time to start fitting all these parts together in the fuse. That's when I ran into a mistake I made a while back with my vent lines.

When I tried to install the F-768B in the fuse, the vent line was in the way. So I went back to the drawing to see what was wrong. Boy, you just can't spend enough time studying these drawings! The drawing shows a 45° angle in the vent line from just above the adel clamp up to the longeron. Somehow I missed that detail and just ran the line up in a gentle curve. Had I done it correctly it would have cleared. So it was in the way of the flange on the bottom of the F-768B sub-panel. I had two choices: re-make the vent line, or cut a notch in the flange. I chose to cut the notch as seen above. I'll have to do it for the left side, too. That's all I got done this month. I'm working on some other stuff here at home which I'm hoping to get done soon so I can get back to my usual pace, slow as it is.

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