Wednesday, July 8, 2015

Fuse Side Skins

Today we are celebrating two things: (1) the wing kit was delivered one year ago today; and (2) it's Sarah's birthday (probably best to order this the other way around)! Even with the number of setbacks we faced last year with storm damage to the house and a number of other distractions and time-sucks, I feel like we've really made some great progress on the airplane and it's coming together very nicely.

Today was another (and probably the last for a little while) light day for work, which means it was a heavy day in the factory. I picked up where we left off last night working on the mid fuse side skins, match- and final-drilling the skins to the underlying structure. There are quite a few holes to drill, and many of the "lines" to follow aren't very straight or have confusing overlaps. To assist in making sure I didn't miss any holes, I started circling completed areas with a green Sharpie (I also marked "do not drill" holes with a blue Sharpie). After a couple hours, both mid fuse side skins were attached and drilled:

L Mid Fuse Side Skin after match-drilling

R Mid Fuse Side Skin after match-drilling

Turning the page to the next step (29-10), I had to pause and giggle a bit. I was looking forward to reaching this step, because when we had initially received the fuselage a couple months ago I was paging through the plans and stumbled across this page. The plans are typically pretty matter-of-fact and dry of any humor or casual commentary, as one might expect them to be. However, it appears that by the time you get to this part of the build process, Van's rewards you with just a bit of silliness:

Section 29-10, Step 1

The humor is definitely groan-worthy at best, but even so references to a Metric Crescent Wrench and a Sweaty Grunting Human are a welcome relief in an otherwise long and arduous process. The step itself is indeed kind of a pain, and really did end up doing some grunting and sweating... bending structural aluminum takes some elbow grease!

Me and my Metric Crescent Wrench, putting a twist into the F-1041-L

Once all four fuse channels were twisted into their correct orientations, it was time to modify the wooden clamping block we used on the mid fuse skins to work with the fwd fuse skins by routing out a 1/8" radius on the clamping edge and cutting a different angle along the side. Unfortunately I forgot to snap a photo of it, but other than using a differently-contoured clamp it's basically the same process as what was done for the mid skins. Once they were both done, the assembly could start being clecoed together, introducing a small handful of new parts including some that had been set aside in earlier sections. The resulting product was certainly photo-worthy!

The fuselage (L side) with side skins clecoed into place

The fuselage (R side) with side skins clecoed into place

Close-up of F-1069-R Fwd Side Skin

Starting to look more and more like a cockpit!

Inside the cabin, R fwd area

Pretty awesome! With all this clecoed together it looks like a giant "canoe" of sorts, although I'd imagine it probably wouldn't float all that well. That made for a pretty good stopping point, I think the next steps are going to be more drilling in the forward fuse area, followed by the always-disappointing tasks of deburring, deburring, and deburring.

Probably not going to be a ton more progress over the next couple of days due to some other things that need to get taken care of, and some longer days with work ahead... but stay tuned!