Drilled the longerons fwd of F-704 bulkhead - 6 hours

A big item on my to-do list is to finish drilling the longerons forward of the F-704 bulkhead. I've put this off for a couple of days thinking how best to do this. I want to ensure that the longerons are even on both sides. I fear that if I just go ahead and drill them they may not be exactly aligned, even crooked. I finally decided that I need to temporary install the firewall. I used the ironing board to support the weight and clamped/secured it.

I drew centre lines all down the firewall and down the centre of the bottom skin.

Then I set up the laser level and began checking everything. Some very small adjustments, but I was happy that both longerons where sorted. This was a very tedious process I might add. I began drilling from the F-704 bulkhead forward alternating sides. I finally reached the #30 holes and I marked them with a sharpie to double check edge distances. All good!



I finished drilling the longerons. Now I just need to trim them back 3/4" from the forward edge of the skin. I'll save that for tomorrow.


I need to get the F-904L attach strips cut. Reading other build logs edge distance is a possible concern here so I just used the full 3" lengths that came with the kit. Ill drill them first and then cut after to ensure edge distance is not compromised. I checked the fwd pieces and marked them to be cut at an angle so that they will nest into the longeron.

I started to carefully mark and drill my holes. I also rounded the bottom edges to nest into the radius of the longeron.

As you can they are very long. The aft pieces will allow me to drill an extra cleco at the top.   I will trim them down. The blue line represents 2 1/16" however that is too close to the rivet hole so I scrubbed that line. I'll do some checking on build logs first, but I will likely leave a good amount of edge distance and go a bit longer than the 2 1/16" dimension.