middle bulkhead started
Yee Haw! On to the next assembly. This building thing is seriously addictive. I’m having a ball. The best days are when I come in from the garage in the evening with my feet hurting from standing all day.
This is the start of the 705 bulkhead that is just aft of the seats. It actually provides an number of structural needs: This is where the top of the seat backs are supported, this is where the seatbelt anchors are attached, and the bottom of this bulkhead is were the rear wing spars attach. I started by spending about 20min. in the parts room finding all of the pieces for this assembly. Much of it was just raw material stock that had to be identified. With all the materials spread out, I started marking the materials that needed to be cut for part fabrication (spacers, blocks, brackets, etc.). Measure twice, mark the part, and measure again before going to the bandsaw. Then I spend some quality time at the bandsaw, belt sander, and scotchbrite wheel (oh, there was also plenty of filing by hand too) to fabricate all the needed parts from sheet, angle, and bar stock. How many times have I said this before: The instructions are now very brief, like “Assemble parts A, B, C, D, E, and F per drawing 20.” Well, you first have to make those parts from the correct stock…
With most of the parts made, I back drilled the lower aluminum bar on the drill press. This worked out very well. Getting all of these parts to come together in alignment is kind of tricky. I sure have a lot of respect for those that built these things before pre-punched kits were available. With the lower bar drilled (a couple of hours of work), I moved on to the seat belt brackets. The sequence on these is to measure, mark, and drill all of the left brackets, then jig things up to match drill the right brackets. This is where I left off.
