As you can tell from my subject lines, I am having a ball building/assembling this airplane.
This pic looks like a step back from last week but lo and behold.....no clecos. http://rvflying.tripod.com/fri1.jpg The bulkheads are all primed along with the J channel stringers. The floor comes with a J stringer bent into it on both sides. You can't see it here but the aft section is bolted in for the tailwheel. You actually build these airplanes twice. The first time you cleco everything together and final drill all the holes. On these skins the prepunched holes are .002 undersize so you drill/ream them out to a #40. Then it all comes back apart where every hole gets deburred and dimpled. The dimple dies I use on substructure, such as the bulkheads is about .002 deeper than the skin dimple die. This allows the skin dimples to sit down a little more giving a nice flush head on the outside. As you can see, the prepunched stuff is jigless. I built this aft fuselage on two shopmate work benches. The forward bulkhead of the aft fuselage is not rivet on yet as the center section side skin gets riveted on there overlapping the aft side skin. Here is the center section all together awaiting final drilling and deburring over this weekend. The square bulkhead is the seatback bulkhead with the baggage compartment floor behind it. The back of the baggage compartment floor rivets to the forward bulkhead of the aft fuselage. You can see the seatbelt brackets sticking up through the floor. http://rvflying.tripod.com/fri2.jpg I just riveted two of these together so I could work on something other than the fuselage one evening. He used such basic alum. parts to make things. No rocket science here. On the bottom you will see a hinge with the center eye ground out. This is where you install split pins as once you would not be able to get a full length pin in with the side on. Three half hindges go on the bottom for and aft so you can "adjust" the seat position. http://rvflying.tripod.com/fri3.jpg As a means to show how simple things are put together to make something work, here is how the seat incline in adjusted. More straight up just put the seat back "thing" in the forward slot, more reclined put it in the back slot. These is accomplised with nothing more than an alum. angle on the back of the seatback bulkhead with a piece of bent .032 and a shim. KISS at it's best. http://rvflying.tripod.com/fri4.jpg Lookin forward to Beer & Brats at Oshkosh!! Dana Overall 1999 & 2000 National KR Gathering host Richmond, KY RV-7 slider/fuselage Finish kit ordered!! Buying Instruments http://rvflying.tripod.com do not archive _________________________________________________________________ The new MSN 8: smart spam protection and 2 months FREE* http://join.msn.com/?page=features/junkmail
