Last night, I mentioned thinking about going ahead and building a rotisserie for the fuselage, and I hadn’t changed my mind by the time I left work today – so I stopped by Harbor Freight on the way home and picked up a cheap 1000-pound engine stand. I also went by Home Depot to get some pieces of angle iron and a few bolts and nuts.

The general idea of the rotisserie is to go ahead and drill the engine mount holes out to 3/16” (not their final size) and use these to attach the angle iron in such a way that the firewall can then be attached to the engine stand. The tail can simply be supported by the tailspring, and the fuselage is turned by simply turning the engine stand.

The first issue evident once I got the engine stand assembled was that the upright wasn’t vertical – the digital level actually showed it off by about 3°. In order for the rotisserie to work properly, I want it to be pretty close to dead vertical. So began a long series of tinkering with the thing, trying to figure out ways to straighten it. There’s no kind of adjustability for this, so basically I just started figuring out ways to reassemble it incorrectly that would tweak the angle. But nothing seemed to work right, and eventually I resigned myself to needing to buy some more hardware to make this work.

I’d given up for the night when I had another idea for tweaking the thing – and this time, it worked. The upright is now just .3° off dead vertical, which I figure is close enough for government work. So tomorrow or Friday, I should be able to attach the angle iron pieces to the firewall and get this thing put together. Then I can finish riveting those cockpit rails…

Finally, with the fuselage back upright, I can start moving forward through the construction manual again. I’d figured I’d get the cockpit rails riveted – or mostly riveted – tonight, but there ended up being more small things to do than I thought.

First up was finally torquing the two lower bolts which attach the seat ramp angles to the center section. These bolts have been loosely installed for some time; they weren’t tightened because they had to be periodically moved to allow for shooting rivets. The rivets through the center section and the mid bottom skins were the last ones of concern here, so the bolts could finally be torqued. Doing this was kind of fun; holding the bolt involves reaching inside the center section, and there’s not much room in there. I ended up with Josie reaching in from the outside to hold the wrench while I leaned over into the cockpit and tightened the nuts.

Next up was installing the rear seat lap belt brackets. These slide through slots in the bulkhead webs, in between the aft lower longeron and another bracket mounted above, and three AN3 bolts hold the assembly together. The fit here is pretty tight, and I had to do some tapping with a hammer to get the brackets in place, and also to get the bolts through the holes. Getting the nuts started and torqured wasn’t much fun either – at one point I was lying on my back on strategically-placed pieces of lumber in the fuselage.

Here’s a shot of one of the brackets in place. Note the bulkhead to the left, leading to the cabin. The nuts are barely visible under the bracket. Note also how the bracket curls upward away from the fuselage skin. This made it fun to hold the bolts while torquing the nuts:

Next up, I riveted the finished floor support angles in place. This required some creativity with riveting, since the angles are close to the mid side skins, and the seat ribs also restrict access with, say, the squeezer. I was able to squeeze four of the rivets, but had to shoot the other two using an offset rivet set – and holding the gun in a weird backhand way, squeezing the trigger with my thumb.

I started unclecoing the center section bulkhead caps, preparatory to clecoing the cockpit rails into place, but I realized that the left cap needed a little work. Way back when I was working out the rear throttle linkage, I cut holes in the bulkhead web for the pushrod to pass through – well, matching notched were needed in the cap flange. I figured it would be easier to cut and tweak these holes now, without the cockpit rails in the way, so I did that:

A look at the aft notch with the cap clecoed in place (through a mirror, because there’s no way to get a decent direct shot):

Finally, I could cleco the rails in place. It was getting close to quitting time by this point, but I went ahead and squeezed six rivets on each side for good measure:

I’m pretty sure I’ll be able to squeeze most of these rivets, and the ones I can’t squeeze should be easy to shoot. The only exceptions, I think, will be the rivets behind the mounting plates for the seat back support. I may need to recruit help for those…hopefully I won’t have to lie on lumber in the fuselage to buck them. Further along in the planes are instructions for cutting plywood into work platforms for the tail – I might go ahead and make those for times like this. I’m also thinking that it might be time to go buy a cheap Harbor Freight engine stand to make a rotisserie out of – a lot of the work tonight would have been a lot easier if I’d been able to turn the fuselage sideways instead of leaning over. Actually, come to think of it, riveting the cockpit rails would also probably be easier with the fuselage sideways…guess I might be making a stop on the way home from work tomorrow.

It’s done! I got a bit ahead of myself last night be declaring all the annoying riveting to be done. It turned out there were still some challenging spots left, most notably the rivets at the lower aft end of the mid side skins, where they curl underneath to the belly. The radius of the curl is pretty small, which forced me to use a narrow bucking bar on several of the rivets, and I also had the outboard aft seat ribs in the way as well. There were a couple rivets here that we had to drill out and re-shoot – this was entirely due to me having trouble keeping the bucking bar in place due to the cramped quarters.

Once we got those done, though, it was smooth sailing. We shot all the rivets between the mid bottom skins and the aft portion of the center section (the forward line will be riveted later in assembly with the forward bottom skin). Then we shot all the rivets along the lower edge of the forward outboard seat ribs, plus a few assorted rivets I couldn’t quite get to by myself.

That just left ten rivets on each forward side skin, in the area of the gear towers. These were more fun than some of the others and required some fresh contortions. While the cabin and tail area of the fuselage is open at the top, there are two braces across the cabin at the tops of the gear towers, which I had to work around to buck these rivets. All in all it wasn’t especially challenging, just uncomfortable. I can’t imagine, though, how horrible these rivets would have been had I not done the removable gear tower cover modification. At least I had nice big holes through which to hold the bucking bar.

While I was down there, I decided to try and grab a selfie to illustrate my discomfort. Here I’m leaving against the sawhorse that’s supporting the fuselage. There’s just enough room between it and the brace for me to get my upper body in there:

But once these were done, that was it – the end of this riveting odyssey (for the time being, at least). Once I crawled out from under the fuselage and retrieved all my tools that had collected down there, we rolled the fuselage upright again, for the first time in – let’s see – three weeks. Looks much sleeker without a few hundred clecos sticking out:

I also took care of some other tasks during the day today when Josie wanted to go inside and rest for a bit (I have to remember that working the rivet gun is probably a little more physically challenging for her). I finished demurring the replacement seat ribs I got the other day, match-drilled them with the spacers that will sit on top of them, and riveted the nutplates in place. Those angles are now ready to rivet in the near future.

Most notably, I riveted the seatback support plates to the mid side skin bulkheads. I had originally planned on doing these after we’d rolled the fuselage upright again, but after looking at them while sitting under the fuselage, I decided they’d be easier to do this way. These plates were challenging to rivet, since I had to hold the bucking bar inside a cramped space between the plate and skin. At one point, I seriously considered ordering some expensive Cherrymax blind rivets to use here, but eventually I managed to get them all shot.

Next steps will be to rivet the cockpit rails in place (should be a solo job, I think), and then permanently attach the seatback support. Then we’ll roll the fuselage over once again, and it’ll be time to fit the landing gear legs!

We continue creeping ever closer to getting this riveting done. Tonight we finished up all of the really annoying riveting around the aft seat ribs and also shot a handful of rivets at the rear seat lap belt anchor points. At this point I feel like the tough riveting is behind us (for the time being, that is), and it should be downhill from here. Hopefully we can get this wrapped up tomorrow…I’m kind of getting tired of sitting on the garage floor under the fuselage…

So not a whole lot of interest to report here, just more and more riveting. Tonight we worked on the rivets at the aft end of the seat rib assembly, and I think these are probably the most tedious ones to deal with here. The understructure here is such that it’s almost impossible for me to even get a good look at the rivets I’m bucking. By itself, this isn’t a huge deal – I’ve shot plenty of rivets and just held the bucking bar by feel, but in most of those cases I had good access to hold the bar in such a way that I could make sure it was square. In this spot, it’s also hard to get my hand on the bar to hold it securely, which makes things a lot more fun.

At this point, we have almost all the rivets on the right side of the fuselage in this spot done. We stopped short of a few, simply because I could not for the life of me figure out how to get any of my bucking bars onto the rivet tail. I guess I’m hoping that maybe I’ll have an epiphany overnight or something. I’ve also considered using blind rivets here, but I don’t think I have any that have the required grip length here. Several spots in the build specify that MK-319BS rivets can be used in place of the 426-3 flush rivets, but they’re always spots where it’s just a single skin and a rib. Here I have two skins and a slightly thicker-then-normal rib, so I’m not sure the MK319-BS rivets would be acceptable.

The good news is that once we get this area done, everything else that’s left will be simple by comparison. Assuming I can figure out a way to buck these last few obnoxious rivets (or use blind rivets in their place), I think we might have a good chance of finishing up the fuselage canoe riveting this weekend.

Josie wasn’t feeling well tonight, so rather than do any riveting, I decided to work on some of the replacement parts I got from Van’s last week. First I separated the floor support angles and final-drilled all the holes. I also dug up the spacers which will sit on top of the angles, separated them, and clecoed them to the angles. I considered match-drilling the spacers to the angles and going ahead and riveting on the nut plates, but I decided it’d be better to do that once the fuselage is upright again, so I can ensure that everything fit together OK.

Next I worked on prepping the replacement forward gear crossmember. I cleaned up the edges, final-drilled the holes, and countersunk the required places. I’ll probably shoot primer on the crossmember Saturday. Finally, I got out the new cooling ramp and trimmed the edges. I didn’t do any match drilling on that though, because I decided it would be more fun to cleo it in place temporarily for fun.

Here’s the cooling ramp by itself under the forward floor:

Then I clecoed the forward bottom skins in place to get the big picture:

Hopefully tomorrow we can pick back up on the riveting!

So tonight was kind of a turning point, I think. Two-person riveting so far has been an often-frustrating experience; it seemed like Josie was just completely unable to get a handle on using the rivet gun in moderation, resulting in lots of overdriven rivets. After thinking it over, it occurred to me that it was a bit unfair of me to drop her right into riveting with little direct feedback, just me trying to coach through a sheet of aluminum. It’s a lot easier to learn riveting when you’re doing it solo and you can watch the rivet tail deform as you shoot.

So last night, in lieu if riveting the fuselage, I drilled a bunch of holes in some scrap to make a riveting practice kit. While I think that helped it still seemed like Josie was having trouble handling the gun. I was thinking things over before bed last night and realized the obvious problem – I run the rivet gun at a pretty high pressure. This gives me lots of power when I want it, but requires precise trigger control. It works great for me because I’ve literally shot thousands of rivets with the thing. It’s also about the worst setup possible for an inexperienced riveter, where an extra millimeter of trigger pull can go from “that’s good” to “I destroyed the rivet in a quarter second.”

So today, I turned the pressure to the gun way down, to where it was impossible to run the gun at a “destroy everything” level. We shot a few more test rivets in scrap and it seemed promising, so we went back to the fuselage. The results were…great. No overdriven rivets, none requiring drilling out. We didn’t get a huge number done, but I’m OK with that because everything else went so well.

To think, all this time I’ve been frustrated because I thought Josie was being careless, when in fact I was careless and I set her up for failure. Lesson learned.

Not much to report, we’re just continuing to slowly work our way through the riveting, a bit at a time. Tonight we shot most of the rivets at the joint between the mid bottom skins and the aft bottom skin. These will be some of the last rivets that don’t require interesting contortions, so I guess I’d better try to enjoy them…

So when I built out the in-flight adjustable rudder pedal assembly a few weeks back, I made the mistake of cutting the release cable too short. Since there was no urgent need to fix that, I simply put the needed repair parts on my shopping list. Meanwhile, last week I discovered a number of parts I needed to replace, which got my shopping list to a point where it felt worthwhile to pony up for the shipping. My order from Van’s showed up yesterday, so tonight I set about fixing up the rudder pedals.

Basically, I ordered all the parts needed to make a new release assembly; the cable + latch center, six aluminum spacers, and two steel endplates. While I was looking at the old stuff tonight, I noticed that the endplates on the current release assembly were already rusting, so I decided to prime the new endplates before assembling. Through some kind of miracle, the rattle-can epoxy primer I used on the gear legs last weekend was still spraying (despite the claimed pot life of 48 hours), so I used that on the endplates, figuring it was a little more durable than the regular Napa stuff. Besides, the epoxy was expensive, and it’s nice to extract every last bit of it I can.

After letting the primer dry a bit, I riveted together the new assembly and installed it. This time I didn’t trim the release cable at all – it’s a bit long, but I’ll take that over playing chicken with getting the length right again.

While I was working the pedal assembly, I also noticed that the slide bar was rusting where it’s just bare metal. I don’t want to put any kind of heavy grease here, since when I’m flying in jeans or other long pants, they’re sure to make contact with the slide bar and get nasty, but obviously leaving it bare wasn’t going to work at all. Instead, after scrubbing off all the surface rust, I got out my trusty can of CLP from the gun cleaning box and applied a light coat. It works for keeping the guns from rusting without getting them oily, it ought to work just as well here.

Josie has been busy this week, so no more fuselage riveting so far, but hopefully tomorrow night we can get back to it.

My main goal for today was to get the gear legs primed; as I mentioned last night, this would hopefully prevent me from getting hung up this week or next weekend when I was ready to work on the gear. Though at the rate riveting is progressing, who knows…

My first challenge was figuring out how to set up the legs for priming. Lying them on flat plywood seemed subpar, but hanging them was equally interesting since they’re kind of heavy. I ended up with a sort of ghetto solution – I found a piece of scrap lumber that fit between slats in the big gate to the backyard, then supported the other end with my step ladder. Two eye hooks in the wood held up 50# monofilament loops, which could simply be passed through a hole in the gear leg and hung from the hook.

This held the legs up nicely while hardly blocking any area from the primer

Prepping the epoxy primer was more fun. The stuff I’m using is rattle-can 2K epoxy primer from Eastwood. Basically, you push a pin on the bottom of the can, the two parts are allowed to mix, you shake the can for about 3 days or so to ensure proper mixing, and you have epoxy primer without a lot of cleanup. The can also implies this stuff is kind of toxic, so I made sure my respirator was on nice and tight before I started shooting. I shot with the bottoms of the legs up first, let everything dry for about an hour, then flipped the legs so I could shoot the tops up at eye level.

The legs with nice gray primer:

The primer went on pretty nicely, though the finish is surprising rough. I don’t particularly care in this case since this is just for protection, not looks, but if I was shooting topcoat on this stuff, I’d definitely feel the need to sand it smooth first. In my case, I imagine the exposed portions of the legs will get stripped back to bare metal when the plane gets painted anyway.

While I was in the priming mood, I also got the cockpit rails out and primed them:

Once all the rivets get shot on the bottom of the fuse, these will get riveted back on the top side. My intent is to topcoat them with the same interior paint, but I’m not going to do that until they’re riveted in place, because all the flush rivets would undoubtedly mar the topcoat anyway. I’m actually leaning towards waiting indefinitely to topcoat these, simply because I figure they’re likely to get marred at a later time. It’ll be easy to mask around them when I’m ready.

After the priming was done, we had some other stuff to do around the house, but we planned on shooting rivets again after dinner. We reshot a number of rivets in the tail that had been drilled out previously, then started work on the mid bottom skins and the aft bottom skin. Unfortunately, it didn’t shape up to be a good night after this – there wasn’t a great vibe out there and after three bad rivets in a row, I decided we should call it a night. Quitting without a lot done is frustrating, but less so than ruining a bunch of rivets and having to drill them out anyway. Sometimes you have to pick your battles, so to speak.