Another no-photo night, I’m afraid. I decided to work on making provisions for securing the ground bundle. I already knew I’d be adding an Adel clamp on the auxiliary longeron forward of the gear tower, but I was debating also putting one on the forward brace above where the bundle goes down into the tower. The latter would be similar to what I did with the larger bundle coming up out of the right gear tower; on this side, the bundle was much smaller, but eventually I decided I wanted it secured as well.
Getting the nutplate mounted on the brac was pretty straightforward, though it still required the angle drill and some other creativity. The longeron was a lot more fun – initially I thought about just drilling the screw hole and using a nut instead of a nutplate, but I really didn’t like the idea of needing two hands to get the thing secured, so I went with the nutplate mount here too.
Unfortunately I didn’t finish that mount. The aux longeron is kinda fun to work on since it butts against the curved forward side skin – this means getting a tool aligned with a hole can be challenging. I already knew I’d have to make the rivet countersinks by hand, but I couldn’t even use the long shaft with the countersink bit here. Eventually I rigged up a combination of a hex adapter, 1/4” socket, wobbly joint, and a few extensions. That worked but it seemed like it’d take forever. So I added an adapter and my T-handle wrench, which let me put more torque on the setup.
That turned out to be a bad combination – it was hard to keep the bit well aligned, but easy to overcome the resistance from bad alignment with the T-wrench. The result was that I snapped the tip off my countersink bit on the second hole, and that tip remained lodged in the hole. I worked on extracting it for a while but eventually decided that I was getting to the point of causing damage if I kept trying to force the issue. Hopefully revisiting this in the morning, I’ll have better luck.