Rear Fuselage Riveting Part 1 (4h)

The next few visits are all about riveting! Which means they are also all about deburring which is not so good, but as long as the pile of unattached aluminum goes down, it is all good.

Before you can start sealing up the rear fuselage, the flaperon control assembly must be in place because it is going to disappear. The only thing that was stopping me from doing this a long time ago was how to safety tie the castle nuts with the cotter pin. The nice guys at EAA have a video showing you exactly how to do it and here is my very first FAA-technique approved cotter pin safety tie.

There are two of these to do and then the assembly can go into the fuselage. I struggled to get the arm into the mounting brackets so had to file down the bearings a bit to get them on, and then a bit more to get enough free motion so that I thought the motor would be able to push and pull it.

I installed the flaperon control motor per the instructions in the video (which seemed to match those in the forums) and connected it to the flaperon arm. A quick play with a 9V battery seemed to indicated there was enough motion.

From there, I installed the baggage back and riveted the top and sides

I had been toying with the idea of adding another stiffener to the roof to help prevent oil canning after having weakened the other stiffeners with the antenna but with the baggage back in place I think this will take care of that.

After that came the baggage shelf

(of course I am deburring and priming all these parts as I go)

and then the control top

Before the cover goes on, you need to put the vertical flaperon control rods inside. Apparently they don’t need to be hooked up to anything yet, this can be done later. The bottom connection is fine because it sticks out underneath everything else and, reading ahead, I will cut a hole for the top connection.

Light was fading and I’d already been at the hangar long enough so I ended the day by cleco’ing the top cover in place, ready for riveting next visit.