Riveting forward fuselage
It was a great four day holiday weekend for building. Thanksgiving day, Tanya and I were up early to prime the pile of parts that compose the entire forward fuselage. It was a three hour priming session, all done by noon. We then took off to go sailing while the parts dried. Back from sailing, Thursday evening, I started riveting small sub-assemblies and nutplates.
The next day I spent the full day with small assemblies and clecoing the full forward fuselage together. The trick here is getting the side skins put together in the correct sequence to pull everything into alignment. It took me at least a full day to get everything clecoed together. Tanya’s initial comment was “Wow, that is a lot of rivets that we have to drive.” So we started riveting at the center bulkhead and moved forward and aft from there. We shot rivets for a total of about six or seven hours this weekend and are about half done. This is very rewarding work. Most of the details of funky rivet placement and situations have already been documented elsewhere (Checkoway) so I’ll spare you the details. I did do a fair amount of cutting slightly longer rivets than were specified for correct length in some locations.
