Measuring longerons - 3 hours

It was time to start on the longerons. These have been sitting up on the garage shelf for quite some time. They collected a lot of dust. I spent some time getting the garage ready, putting saw horse out and leveling the run to aid in accurate measuring. I cleaned up the ends of the longerons and then clamped them together and began marking out the dimensions. After a good discussion with a local builder he offered a few tips and suggestions, using the bottom skin and the aft canopy deck pieces as a guide. He mentioned that he had to trim a bit of the front of the longeron to fit the bulkhead which got me thinking about if I could get myself into hot water with edge distance issues (as was the case with the F-728/729 angles)

 I spend a few hours researching and reading. Before I did anything I decided to research the whole longeron process. I was most curious about if I could run into any potential edge distance issues, seems that most folks trim about ¼” off the front of their longerons. After all my reading I decided to give myself some extra material to play with (½” extra to be exact). So I erased all my marks and drew a new reference line that would give me ½” extra. I clamped a piece of oak on the new datum point and re-measured all the dimensions out. 

 

 

 

 

 

Riveting F-712, F-706 (again) and F-707 & F-708 - 4 hours

I woke up this morning ready to go on riveting the bulkheads together. I started with the F-712 bulkhead. I back riveted the entire assembly it turned out so good.






Funny though that after I had it all riveted is when I figured out that the plans have you hold off this step. I did not read the manual for F-712, I just assumed. I started checking off steps in the manual and that's when I noticed it.

I began to dig into who, what, why and where. Took my hours to figure out if this is going to be a problem.  I finally came to the conclusion after talking to a local builder friend (and also noticed that this was done on a few other build logs - John's RV7A project, Bruce Swayze's RV7A project) that this was totally ok to leave riveted on and did not cause issues later. An angle drill is used to start the #1/8" holes into the vertical stabilizer, and of course I plan on using the drill press anyway to finish the job. 

I suspect the plans are set up this way to accommodate the quick builds. Anyone with a quick build fuse (7 or 7A) gets the fuselage with nothing on the bulkhead. If you have a 7A you then have to fabricate the tie down bar and install it before you mount the vertical stabilizer. It would be reasonable that to avoid confusion they just have everyone do it later. 

After all my research, I am confident that my little oops has actually turned out to be the better method of installation.

Now that I could breath easy, I moved onto riveting the F-706 bulkhead...Again.
 




 Admittedly I struggled a bit with setting the left side rivets on the F-729 rib. On my first attempt a few weeks ago, I put the factory heads of the rivets forward, leaving shop heads aft on the web flange, the result is that it wanted to curl the web flange up. So on this attempt I put the factory heads aft to prevent the flange from curling. Much more difficult to squeeze those rivets and get them straight. After drilling them out, I decided to go for the bucking method a used the same technique as that used on setting the wing ribs. bending the rib slightly to the side and using a super long rivet set. Worked perfectly. 
 
I completed the F-706 bulkhead. Obviously I've not riveted the F-728 and 729 angles at this time. I will do that once I can confirm perfect alignment of the bellcrank axis. 

I then riveted the F-707 and F-708 bulkheads. Easy