10/13/2007
Whew! Long day today! Sometimes I wonder what I'm missing by staying in my garage with the door closed all day (it's getting chilly here...). Anyway, I had a goal of getting the roll bar riveted together today, and I fell short by an hour, maybe a little more.
This morning, I started by clamping the rear halves of the frame to the table. I measured the width, several times to be sure, and had to make a 7/16" trim from the center of the frame. I split that in half, and removed that amount from each half.
Then I clamped the F-631E plate to the center of the two halves, and drilled that to the frame.
Next was the bottom strap that gets drilled to the lower flange of the rear half of the frame.
I don't know how I went so long without those two vise clamps...I just got them this summer, and I use them ALL THE TIME!
The bottom strap was then drilled.
Then I repeated the process for the top strap.
The front halves then get clamped down to the rear half and the straps. The thickness was measured 1 1/2" all the way around, and I drilled the straps to the front half.
After all those holes were drilled (somewhere close to 160 holes!!), I fit and drilled the other 631E to the frame. This goes inside the frame, but can be drilled from the outside at this point.
I had a little bit of the straps sticking out of one side of the frame, so I trimmed that down, and then measured the height to see how much I needed to trim from the bottom of the frame.
To my surprise, it was right on the money! Most need an eighth or so trimmed off the bottom. The yellow line is 17 19/32", just as the plans say.
I took a break to make some dinner at this point (Brit is in St. Louis with Yeager...it's hard to cook for two, even harder for one!), and is the reason I ran out of time tonight...I ended up watching the first few innings of the ballgame, and was inside for a good two hours!
Oh well, when I went back out there this evening, I clamped and drilled the little angle on the rear face of the frame.
Then it was time to countersink for the rivets. I hate countersinking.
It was 10:30pm when I stopped. I was going to prime the parts tonight, but that stuff dries so fast, I'll just knock it out in the morning.
7.25 hours