From here there a quite a few pieces of metal that need to be placed inside the rear fuselage and drilled out and it should go together quite quickly. The DVDs for this phase intermix installing the controls with the fuselage parts and I may follow along with them rather than the book. If I do that though (well, even if I don’t) I have to prime and paint the steel control parts with some hard core rust proofing so they don’t rot on me in the air.
I had taken the baggage assembly out of the fuselage for riveting so the first task was to put it back in. This was not easy at all and in the end I decided to rivet the stiffeners and top angle in place so that those clecos weren’t in the way of the skins.
And then I went a stage further and put the baggage uprights in first and then clecoed the baggage back to it. This worked very nicely but isn’t going to be any good for final fitting because there is a rivet at the very top corner of the baggage back that will be impossible to pull when inside the fuselage.
Next I clecoed the Torque Tube Bearing Channel
on the bottom skin, and then the Torque Tube Bearing Support to the Channel.
Later these will get drilled with bigger holes and even some tasty bolts. Something new: seatbelt shoulder harness on both sides.
The holes in these got enlarged to size 20.
Flaperon Control Covers went on next.
Followed by the right and left hand Baggage Uprights. I was stumped by this for a while and could not work out how it installed in the pieces that were already in there. I blame the person who put the sticker on “upside down”.
Here’s a shot of both uprights in place.
There are three holes in each baggage upright that need to be backdrilled into the flaperon control covers. My very long drill bits came in handy for this.
These were drilled out to size 30.
Next up I took care of an oversight from a long time ago – drilling through the top skin into the top of the baggage back angle.
Finally for the day I opened up all the holes in the flaperon control covers for an A4 rivet.
Installing lots of little pieces is a nice change of pace from drilling endless long lines of holes. There are still a few more pieces to assemble and drill out before we can move on to the forward fuselage construction. Until then, here’s a picture of everything so far
