Center fuselage connection and bottom floor skin

TLDR

• Connected the center fuselage and rear fuselage
• Made some custom parts to mate bottom floor skin to fuselage ribs

Details

The problem

So recently I riveted the center fuselage ribs to connect to the rear fuselage.

Fuselage connected

My plan for next step is to add the bottom skin, so the whole structure is more rigid and then I can work on the control tubes etc.

The ribs connecting to rear fuselage

However, when I test fit the bottom skin, I ran into a significant problem. The skin and the bottom of rib on rear spar has a pretty big gap (about 1.5-1.7mm).

The gap is near the cleco plier

Close up view of the gap

Also, the holes on skin and rib do not line up.

holes do not align

The solution

I asked Sling technical what to do. Their answer is exactly as I planned. I would first make some spacer to fill the gap, and also make a double on top of the rib. Then I would match drill the whole sandwich to get a line of unified holes and no gaps.

I also decided to enlarge the holes (within edge distance) to 4.0mm and use longer rivets to provide more strength.

Work in progress spacer

Video

Been a while to do a video update, here is a summary to my last few week’s work.