Time for a new chapter in the build and therefore to go with it a new category menu item at the top of the page: it’s fuselage time! The big news for this chapter is that my Dad is visiting us between now and just after New Year and we hope to make a good dent in the fuselage (so to speak).
The fuselage is in two parts – a rear and a forward which will get joined together later. We start then with the rear which being a box consists of four sides, we’ll build the bottom skin, add the sides and then stick the top on.
Each skin is held to the others by riveting them to longerons, which are very long straight pieces that run the full length of each side of the skin. There is a little ridge on the side which the skin slides up to for the right position. The first stage then in the bottom skin was to drill through all the pre-drilled holes into the longerons. You have to start in the middle and work out because the skin edge isn’t straight, and you have to gradually bend the longeron a little to hug the curve. With two people this isn’t too bad but on my own this would have taken a while. It didn’t help that the bench isn’t long enough.
If you remember the previous post I noted that I had cut some z-angles for stiffeners for the bottom skin. Here they are:
They get placed around the access hole, seen here from the top.
There are more stiffeners that criss-cross down the skin and these are made by cutting up l-angles to fit. Stiffeners that go straight across the skin go the full width of the skin onto the longerons, the diagonal ones stop short.
Once we were happy with the lengths, we back drilled through the skin to cleco them in place.