Rear fuselage: covering the remaining top skin
TLDR
- Clecoed the right half rear top skin
Details
I’ve been procrastinating this task for a while. On the one hand, I need to close the rear skin as soon as possible and make space for my workshop. And if every hole lines up it will also validate the overall alignment of the fuselage. So it’s really important to get this done. But I’ve been dreading because it’s a bulky part, and I am also secretly afraid what if holes don’t line up.
Today I finally decided to just do it. Turns out it’s less daunting than I thought. Me, my wife and my dad spent all of less than an hour to mount up the skin.
We first moved the skin close to the ship and I made sure I had plenty of cleco within reach. Then I removed all clecos on overlapping skins and started to hang the right top skin.
We first clecoed a few holes near the center, then I traced holes from front to rear, from bottom to top, rib first, then longeron.
Some holes along the middle ribs did not line up, but not too bad. I think I will need to do some slight match drilling or just wiggle it with an awl. But bottom row and top row both lined up, so I think this means the overall alignment is good.
During cleco, I found I forgot to dimple a few holes near the parachute hole, so I did that with a hand riveter. Not a big deal.
But I also discovered that I dimpled a row of 8 holes too early on the very front row of the top skin. This is supposed to be the overlapping part of canopy. I just followed the dimple instruction on KAI but this will cause some issue when I fit the canopy under the skin. Oh well, too late to do anything now so I will have to adapt when the time comes.
