Static clips, gussets, aft deck
It was a reasonably productive weekend. I started off making a bunch of little clips to hold the static line. It took about three tries before I had a reasonable productive fabrication method down pat. Once I had it figured out, I proceeded to make fourteen of those little suckers. That was pretty time consuming, but the static line will be well secured. I also had to figure out where to punch a hole in the bulkhead for the static line. I have spent a lot of time thinking about this one and doing a lot of research. Most people don’t say anything about it and the plans don’t either. I concluded that I would drill a 1/4″ hole in the top corner of the bulkhead, right through the bracket. I also spent way too much time trying to figure out how I was going to set the three longeron rivets on the outside skin after the bulkhead bracket was riveted in place. There is no clearance for the tail of a rivet, much less any room to buck one. I decided to grind some relief spots in the edge of the brackets (before I riveted them on) to provide enough space to use blind rivets.
Moving on to something else, I riveted the firewall upper gussets on. As always, this was more time consuming than one would think. At the back of the plane, I decided I would need a snap bushing in the second to last bulkhead to pass tail lights, so in went a bushing. Next it was finally time to rivet the aft deck. That was very easy and fun. The tail section is now solid. Moving back forward, I decided to prepare the forward side decks. Drill, countersink, deburr, dimple… Also, somewhere in there, I fit and drilled the spar side caps on the interior and put them away for installation at a much later date.
