2/22/2007
Tonight I finished the bending of the longerons! I started with the "sharp" downward bend that matches the side fuselage skin. The plans call for 5.6 degrees, but it actually took a bit more to match the line of the skin. The first pic shows the longeron is level in the vise. The second pic shows the bend at 5.6 degrees, but like I said, it did take another degree or so to match. I think the plans say within a 1/4" of the skin line, but I'm well within that at more like a sixteenth.
You can see just a touch of blue above the longeron, but that is attributed to the fact that I had nothing supporting the longeron to the right of the picture while it was standing up in the air from the curve bend. It's the best pic I could get without help from someone holding it up.
The last thing to do with the longerons is to put the twist in the forward section to match up with the corners of the firewall. 17 degrees of twist is called for, and it's easily done with a crescent wrench. It does take A LOT of twist (WAY past 17 degrees) to get the proper amount to stick.
With that over with, I started on the J channels. All I did tonight was deblue and deburr, then cut to length called for on drawing 18. There are three different lengths, one for top, upper, and lower channels.
2.5 hours