Fuse Side Skins

Sarah and I took a short flight up to KVTI today with our friend Derek to attend a fly-in grill-out cosponsored by our friends at Walter Aviation. It was a great evening of seeing old friends, ramp-wandering, recounting OSH15 stories, and of course munching on some delicious food, including as I was told "all the cake you want". That is a dangerous combination of words. It was delicious, but keeping in mind our weight and balance limitations for the the three of us in the Warrior we flew up in, I only ate one piece. I swear.

On the flight back to Marion, we decided to call up KCID approach and poke into the Class C airspace to take some photos of downtown and fly over the Cedar Rapids Kernels game that a number of our friends were attending for a work event. Keeping FAR 91.119 in mind concerning flight over congested areas, I didn't make quite as low of a pass as I might have wanted to. However, I did rock my wings to say hello, and although there would have been no way to see it for sure I hear that it was reciprocated by a wave or two from the ground. :-)

Derek took this really cool photo of downtown!

Passing over the Kernels game ~1500'AGL

Downtown Cedar Rapids, flying over the Cedar River

Anyway, once we got back home it was time to get back to work for a relatively short build session. Derek stopped by too, and although we didn't have much for him to work on this time, he got to experience firsthand the Mike & Sarah Show, using our headsets to communicate with each other through the firewall and side skins. He took a few pics to chronicle the process:

Setting the floor rib-to-firewall 4-4 flush rivets. This probably could/should have been done earlier, but for sure needs to be done before installing the forward floor covers.

Riveting the bottom of the forward side skin to the floor channel

Sarah poised on the inside of the fuselage with the bucking bar

We tried to keep the mood light :-)

I think we only got through maybe 20 or so rivets tonight, but they were a pretty difficult set of 20 and it was a pretty late start given the events earlier in the evening. We'll finish the rest of them tomorrow or whenever we can both get some time to get back to it. Until next time, that's it for now!