Baggage floor ribs - Fuse Bottom Skins

A quick primer session later, we were ready to install and rivet the baggage floor ribs. Since there are only six of them (as opposed to 12 under the back seat) this effort went, well, twice as fast as the last riveting session, and we had a surprisingly big piece of the fuselage skeleton staring back at us:

Baggage floor ribs attached!

Side view of fuselage aft skeleton complete!

This was definitely pretty exciting. It's easy to see the area that the backseat passengers will sit in, buckle up into, where they will put their feet, and even where they will get hot air from the heater! Pretty neat stuff. Anyway, now that the skeleton is complete, it's time to start with the fuse bottom skins. These are two giant sheets of aluminum with a million holes that go over the bottom of everything we've just created. Time to  cleco it into place and get to match drilling!

For some reason, I didn't snap any photos of the skin match-drilling process, but suffice it to say that it is very much like the wing top/bottom skin endeavor, where you have a ton of holes and just need to do your best to keep track of which holes are "done" and which ones still need attention after shuffling clecoes around. Since we're well versed with this process, it really wasn't too bad but it did take many hours (and several drill battery swaps) to complete. By the end of it though, we had a drilled and deburred set of skins, and a skeleton to match. Now, just to scuff, dimple, and prime... why not move right along to it?!

The ol' Mikey J 2000 slaving away on the bottom skins

Unbelievably, we were actually able to get through the fuselage bottom skin prepwork in ONE day... wow! This included final-drilling, deburring, scuffing, dimpling, and priming a very large number of holes in the skins as well as the substructure. With all that progress made, we had to at least get started on the riveting process, just to say we did :)

Finally, a picture of the bottom skins and the whole assembly together... ready for riveting! Sarah says it looks like a tick... I think I see it.

So, we didn't do a bunch of riveting but we did enough to feel accomplished... we got through all the floor stiffeners and mid fuse seat ribs that could be back-riveted, which is almost all of them. Still plenty more to go though!

Hardly looks like any rivets have been done yet!

Tomorrow we'll continue with the riveting as time permits, Sarah has some stuff going on so in her absence I might go back to do some aileron actuation too, who knows?