Just One of Those Days! (aka Forward Skin Stiffeners) (1 hr)

There are some days you should just stop after a few minutes and this was one of them.

The forward side skins up at the firewall have three lines of predrilled holes running across them for some l-angle stiffeners. The guide says to cut them to size, put crimps in them so that they curve to match the skin, and then drill them in place.

So I got my l-angles out, measured the radius of the curve and cut 6 l-angles and put some crimps in the first one.

Those of you not hard of sight will probably quickly see that I have crimps up and crimps down: I had the crimping tool upside down for the first few tries. When I realised my mistake I turned it over. You might think no big deal but unfortunately there are some metal pieces that lay flat on top of the l-angles so up-crimps are no good. I threw that piece away and cut a new one.

Crimped it upside down. Threw it away, cut a new one. Crimped it correctly (yay!), but had cut it too short. Threw it away, cut a new one. Finally got it right and it wasn’t too difficult to install on the side skin. Got the next l-angle, crimped it the wrong way. At this point I couldn’t believe how I kept getting it wrong, crimping isn’t rocket science, it is very easy to see which way up the tool is. I threw it away and cut a new one. Crimped it correctly, took it to the skin and found it was way too short. Threw it away and cut a new one. Fortunately that was the last of my mistakes and eventually I had both sides installed with l-angles.

The forward angles are like oversized l-angles and they fit on top of each l-angle and are cut to match the curvature of the skin. So I measured the straight line distance across each angle and marked and cut the angles.

I was a bit confused by how the photo guide said to cut the curve in the forward angles (they aren’t crimped, they get cut to match the shape) and at this point I noticed that the l-angles are supposed to go all the way from the firewall flange to the extrusion on the side wall. Even with all my mistakes I hadn’t cut any of them long enough. I laughed. I went home.