I didn’t do any work on the plane since before Christmas. Between traveling and starting school again there wasn’t enough time.
Yesterday I had the help of a friend who was very helpful and we got a lot done. Not much to see, but it was a decent amount of work. I’ll get some pictures in the next update which hopefully is only a week or so away.
Our work was focused on wrapping up the side and bottom boot cowl skins. We got all the tabs drilled out on the skins and fabricated the stiffeners. That was about 3.5 hours of work all together. We spent about an hour screwing around with the right side skin. For some reason, things just didn’t line up the way we had planned and the side skin ended up not covering all of the tabs that are on the forward side of the firewall. We found that by moving it a little everything looked better. The problem was that the holes in the skin no longer lined up with the tabs on the fuselage. I’m a very indecisive person when it comes to stuff, but we finally set ourselves on a path to fix it. We ended up enlarging the two aft holes in the top of the skin to 3/16″ so it would have a tight fit and not just a gaping hole. Time will tell if I obsess of a 1/16″ difference in rivet sizes for two rivets (I think I will forget, eventually).
With my friend’s help, we made quick work of getting the skin rolled, holes drilled, and other various tasks to make sure the fit was good. The stiffeners were also short work with two people working on different tasks.
My next step is to finish transfer drilling the holes from the stiffeners to the boot cowl skins and then moving onward. I believe the top skin and panel fit up are next.
Getting closer to covering time! On that note, I haven’t done any additional covering since my last post.
(6 h)