During the week I ordered and received the replacement brake cylinder supports that I had incorrectly fitted last time around. Not taking any chances this time I trial fit them to the cabin floor with the cylinder installed and then traced around the metal to get the right position. I then clamped those things down like my life depended on it for the drilling.
This worked much better, and here are the supports drilled to final size with the cylinder resting in between.
The next task was to fabricate two l-angles per side to attach the cabin frame to the seat support. It took me a long time and a few attempts to get this right, just wasn’t my day. I sustained multiple edge cuts to my hands, too. Should maybe have taken the weekend off! Anyway, I cut the angles to size and held them in the proper place and drew around the edges. There’s no way to get a drill in there (or at least not with any I own) so once marked I drilled each flange separately.
Re-assembling everything, the l-angles finally fit quite nicely.
After this I drilled out every hole on the cabin floor to its eventual size (with a couple of exceptions suggested by the video for the engine mounts).
And from the other end
Almost all the holes are for an A4 rivet but the two rows at the edges on the longerons are A5, as are the holes in the gear channel.
Next in sequence is to install the forward side skins onto the cabin floor which is a simple case of matching up pre-drilled holes.
I then drilled all the holes to their final size
The next task is to attach the side skins to the cabin frame via the column of pre-drilled holes. This was really hard as the skin at the bottom of the floor doesn’t want to bend enough. I’m not sure how exactly I did it but I got the pilot side one in place.
and then I drilled the holes to A4 rivet size.
I didn’t have any such luck on the passenger side though. I pulled, pushed, drag, swore and none of these things would get the holes to line up. So I gave up and decided to seek advice on the Zenith.aero website in case there was a trick to it. I suspect there is not.
With the exception of that one tiny task, the only thing left to do in the photo manual for the forward fuselage is to attach a heal support gusset to each forward side skin. Here they are with some holes pre-drilled for the heel support, and some lines that were drawn on the wrong side of the flange.
I can’t install the pax side one until I get the skin connected to the frame and the way that the skin curves away from the cabin floor at that point, it didn’t look like the pilot side would be that easy either. So…. I called it a day.
Except, not quite. Later in the day I returned with Teri to help move the fuselage onto the bench. Next weekend I plan to have a go at polishing the wings to finally get rid of that layer of water-damage, and I want to prime/paint the steel parts.