Took some time after dinner tonight to go take a look at the fuse again. Even though I wasn’t going to rivet tonight, I decided to kind of do a dry run of the riveting procedure for these skins. My reasoning here is that the riveting procedure here is pretty specific – there are some tight spaces, and things have to be done in a certain order before other tasks close them off entirely. So I went through and clecoed the main bottom skin on as specified, then followed with the forward crossmember and one of the forward side bottom skins.
Overall, I’m feeling good about riveting this stuff – again, there are some tight spaces, but nothing that I can’t get into with one of my thin tungsten bucking bars. There are definitely a lot more rivets here than you might guess from just reading the construction manual, though. I’m thinking I might do well to get all this stuff riveted over the course of this upcoming weekend…
Oh, and I finally took another picture – here’s the main bottom skin and one of the forward side bottom ones clecoed in place:
With the dry run done, I moved on to reconstructing the cooling ramp. I actually put this bit together some time ago, but discovered that I’d fouled up trimming the skin – yay, time for new parts. I ordered those prior to the move out here, and now it was time to get to work on them. Apparently I already trimmed the skin (correctly) previously, so tonight I just clecoed the stiffeners in place, match-drilled, and deburred the holes.
And it turns out it’s a good thing I did this – the rear stiffener for the cooling ramp needs to be match-drilled and riveted to the forward gear crossmember – before it gets riveted in place (part of the planned weekend work). So yeah, I guess I’ll be continuing to work on the cooling ramp this week…
So yeah, that’s it for tonight.