3/1/2007
I started tonight by trimming the little flange off of the 711 bulkhead to clear the socket hole. I also enlarged the hole a bit more since there won't be a rivet there anyway.
Then I cleco'd that aft assembly together and cleco'd it to the fuselage.
Here's where my night became frustrating. A piece of advise for those not yet to this point is coming...The plans say to cleco the 711/712/779 assembly and the 710 bulkhead to the fuselage. So, if you follow that order, you will be frustrated too!! The 710 bulkhead has to go in FIRST, or you'll be figuring ways to get it in there without removing those 50 or so clecos to take the aft assembly off. I ended up taking the 706 bulkhead up front loose in order to slide the J channels forward to clear the 710 in to position. Whatever. Put the 710 in first.
When this is all in and cleco'd the structure becomes VERY rigid!! It was amazing the difference between when I started with this flimsy thing tonight, and what happens when this is all together. Oh, the other frustrating thing is that the J channels had to be trimmed further to fit. I'll have to clean the ends of those up a bit after all this comes apart after drilling.
Next I began the process of leveling this out with a bubble level and plum bobs. The bubble isn't quite in the middle when I snapped this shot, but I made sure it was before I drilled anything.
I tied a plum bob to the 706 and 707 bulkheads, and used the tooling holes and center rivet lines to make sure this thing had zero twist in it.
Here's the 706 bulkhead. I was ever so slightly to the left of center for this pic, but you can see it points right to the rivet and tooling hole in the bottom of the 707 bulkhead.
Here's a shot thru the tooling hole in the bottom of the 707 bulkhead.
Right down the middle!! I did shim the sides of the fuselage to keep it from tipping since the bottom isn't flat. You can see the wood wedges in this overall pic.
I was gonna stop here for the evening, but I still had about 15 minutes before Brit pulled in, so I went ahead and drilled the upper (middle) right J channel thru every forth hole. I also drilled the first couple on the left side before she opened the garage door.
Overall a good night, but that part in the instructions is quite annoying to say the least. Perhaps they expect you to figure that one out on your own at this point. The hand holding is certainly over with at this point, so maybe it was my mistake. I dunno.
3.0 hours