Wednesday, June 17, 2015

Fwd Fuse Ribs & Bottom Skin

More good progress on the forward fuse section tonight! Picked up where we left off yesterday and finished up match-drilling the F-1043 Fwd Fuse Bulkhead parts and control column mount, then taking everything back apart for deburring. The next steps then involve all-new parts, this time for the bottom skin and floor stiffeners. Took a few minutes to ensure proper orientation by squinting at the plans and making sure we were doing as instructed, ending up with this:

Fwd Fuse Bottom Skin and floor stiffeners clecoed together

Side view of forward bottom skin

Next step was to flip the assembly over and match-drill the 8 stiffeners and 3 brackets to the skins. Next we clecoed the firewall assembly and parts of the F-1043 bulkhead to the skin. Since the firewall assembly is still not 100% complete, there are a number of clecoes holding it together, which should be fine for now. I'm going to try to delay riveting it together for as long as possible to figure out what we're going to do with the center console and tunnel area. Speaking of which, the breaker panel came today!

N407ND's circuit breaker panel

It looks about exactly as I had imagined, and we'll see what we can do with this. Not yet though. In the meantime, lots more clecoing and final-drilling all the forward fuselage parts. It's coming together though!!!

Forward bottom skin with firewall and fwd bulkhead clecoed together-- it's starting to look like a proper "front office"!

R side view of the forward fuse assembly

L side view of the forward fuse assembly

Happy Mikey J!

That's pretty much it for tonight... maybe no more building until the weekend due to some plans to clean up around the house and get ready for my parents who are visiting over this father's day weekend. We'll see if I can convince them to do a rivet or two!