6/21/2006
Today at lunch I came home and prepared and primed parts for the mid cabin covers and front seat ramp. I live about 5 minutes away from where I work.
Way back at the beginning of the fuselage section in the instructions it says not drill and rivet the front top part of the F-804 center section until later. Well, I think it is now later since I am about to drill holes in F-804 for the mid cabin cover nut plates. I called Van's since I couldn't find anything about this in the instructions and they said go ahead and do it now.
I riveted on the forward angle F-802P angle and riveted the rear one to the F-878 brace. Then I cleco'ed the brace assembly to the center section. It was a pretty tight fit. I think my landing gear boxes are about 1/8" closer to F-804 than they should be. I trimmed about this amount from the covers so that they would fit. I then attached the F-880 seat ramp ribs using the nut plates I had put into F-804 a long time ago. Then I drilled all of the mid cabin cover nut plate holes as well as those for the forward seat ramp.
The third picture above is of the shop side of some rivets in the landing gear box. I use the camera a lot to be able to see areas I can't get to. A tiny inspection mirror with a flash light misses a l lot. The one rivet in the middle just under the angle obviously needed to be hit a few more times (which I did).
I took some measurements and found that I can have the fuselage in the garage going from left to right and have plenty of room to mount the wings. This is as long as I do it before installing the engine mount.
I was also giving some thought about how I am going to flip the fuselage. I need to do this to mount the main landing gear and front bottom skins. I think I am going to mount a hard point on the garage ceiling in the back and build a structure that bolts onto where the engine mount does. I will use a comealong to raise the front part of the fuselage and find a volunteer to manhandle the back. I plan to reuse the hard point to hoist the engine. Maybe before I mount the engine I can reuse the fuselage rotisserie system to paint the fuselage.