Sunday night I had some outstanding work I needed to finish up. When I joined the two fuselage sections together (tail cone and mid section), I never saw in the plans were they called to rivet the baggage ribs to the F706 bulkhead. I'm at the point where it's silly not to (not far from fitting the baggage floors and tunnel in fact) so I decided to do that.
For those that haven't done this yet, this would have been *gobs* easier to do while the fuse was still upside down. As it was I had to go through all kinds of gyrations hanging over the side and trying to rivet these dudes. It's done, but would have been a lot easier earlier.
Next was to match drill the F709 bulkhead to the rear deck/skin. I'm going to leave it unriveted for as long as possible since it will be hard to get my hand/arm through the lightening holes if I need to at some point later (pretty confident that will be necessary later on).
Van calls to rivet the F750 baggage sides at this point, then the next line says it's time to install the steps. One glance at this and you know putting the sides on before the steps is a really bad idea. Much harder to get to the steps. So I skipped the sides and started on the steps.
The plans are separate and were written for a -6, although they also talk briefly about the -7 and -9. Not that different anyway.
There is a small hole in the side that gets enlarged to accept the step tube. I drilled this before I bent the skin and riveted it all. It needs to be enlarged to clear the welds, so I started sneaking up on a good fit - grind/file, test, repeat.
Here's the weldment. Pretty rough piece. Needs some cleanup and priming.
I used tape to make mark my line, then used a coarse grinding wheel to get it to length.
Here's the inside view. The outboard rib gets a couple of clearance grooves and the inboard rib gets a hole. I did both of these before I riveted the center section together.
Getting pretty close to a good fit. The lower aft is well off the skin. I bent it down, but still can't get it tight. Have to google around/ask to see what other ones look like. I'm not worried about the strength, but aerodynamically it would be draggy. If I can't get it tighter I'll have to fair it somehow.
Once I had it cut to length and it was fitting well I drilled it on the drill press using the pattern in the plans.
Here's the outboard plate drilled and ready to go. I trimmed the lower right corner to more closely match the fuselage side.
Here it is match drilled to the skin and clecoed on. The second row of rivets from the left needs to align with the F924 bulkhead.
Once the step was clecoed on it was time to drill the WD657 UHMW block to the rib. I drilled the holes on the drill press prior to this.
To drill the rib and step tube to the WD657 block I used an tight fit angle drill attachment on my drill. Here's the kit I got from Isham's. It's been really handy.
Here's the bit and angle drive fitted to the drill. You can get in a very tight spot with this.
Here's the block match drilled and bolted to the rib and step tube.
Once the WD657 block and tube were drilled and bolted, it was time to deburr and prime the steps and rivet them to the skins.
One thing I figured out (don't know if this is good planning on Van's part or just fortuitous circumstance), if you work the holes in the flange correctly, you can get them to fall right on an existing bulkhead rivet, and all the rest will drop between existing rivets. This makes it 1) easy to line up and get started, and 2) works out really well from just a layout point of view. Here's a picture of the rivet I'm talking about.
Here's the right step riveted into place. Pretty happy with how these came out.
Once that was done I went ahead and riveted the F750 baggage skins into place.
Once the side skins are done, the next thing they say to do is rivet the baggage compartment floors into place.
As Dennis says, I need to do some thinking here. As I was clecoing these in, I was looking at what would be inaccessible, and realized I did not have the seat belt brackets in place. I took them off quite some time ago when riveting the center section, and never put them back, thinking there would be a time later when I would do that. It's pretty clear if I don't do them now, I'll have to remove the floor to get them in.
Here are the floor skins in place once I put the seat belt brackets in and torqued them.
I also plan to put the transponder antenna on the bottom of the fuse, and probably two comm antennas. I need to either put in an access plate, make the whole floor removable, or put them in and seal them up (the last one isn't really a serious consideration). For now I'm going to do a lot of noodling/planning/idea stealing, and not actually rivet the floors in since they are easily (and as far as I can tell painlessly) done a bit later.
I also have a couple of rivets on the outboard ribs that aren't done, as well as the spacer block that goes in the rear spar slot and gets bolted in. I'll do those next.
