Saturday, November 30, 2019

Getting ready to fit the longerons - 5 hours

Bit of a long day today working with little progress. Some tedious tasks that I need to take care before I can fit the longerons. Firstly I need to set a handful of rivets still in the aft fuselage. These are not that easy to set due to the curvature of the skin. I managed the very rearward set of rivets but for 8 others I need to call my buddy mike for help.

Mike texted me back will come by in a few days so in the mean time I will have to put the fuselage on pause and move onto the longerons. I brought them down from storage and cleco'd them together. One of the tasks that I held off on was to cut the groove into them. I wanted to wait till now to do that rather than do it prior to bending them.

Now that they are celco'd together, I could verify that they are nearly symmetrical. (well one was out about just a tad ~ 1/32 or 1/16"). So I set it all up, and remeasured and sorted the correct length. Now that they are perfect. I marked out the areas I need to cut.


Rough cuts made on the bandsaw, but then all the rest of it was finalized with lots of careful filing.


I left the aft end of the longeron long on purpose. I will mark them for proper edge distance and cut later. I also left them purposely thicker than 0.125". I'll take the thickness down later.