Starting on rear fuselage: rib 6,7,8,9
TLDR
- Rough inspection on fuselage crate
- Built rear fuselage rib assembly 6,7,8,9
- Prepared rib 5 using the RF jig
Details
Opening the box
With most of the wing work behind me, I opened the crate for the fuselage and did a quick inspection.
For some reason Sling did not include the packing sheet in the crate, so it’s a little difficult to know which parts are on back order.
From what I know based on other documents, a bunch of small parts and the firewall are back ordered. I am really hoping firewall is in the crate. But after looking around, it’s indeed missing :(
I went through the rest of the crate and picked out a few parts to work on, starting with rear fuselage.
Rear fuselage rib 6, 7, 8, 9
The first step of building the fuselage starts with RF. The KAI’s order is 9, 8, 7 so that’s the order I went with.
The process is fairly straightforward: debur, clean, rivet.
Rear fuselage assembly
However during the assmebly of ribs 6-9, the alignment was surprisingly bad compared to empennage and wings. Rib 7 took a lot of effort to kinda align the holes to even insert the cleco. Same for rib 8. I foresee a lot of struggle when installing the skin later on.
Another thing is they called 3.2 x 12mm rivets on rib 7. The material is pretty thin here so I don’t really understand why I needed the 12mm rivets. Also, the space is really tight, I had to switch to long neck rivet gun to pull the rivet without excessively bending the ribs.
RF Jig and Rib 5
After the RF assembly, another small task that I did was to just test fit the rib 5 onto the RF jig, which also took way longer than I thought.
The pieces were large, and very soft. So I took extra care to not bend anything while I’m fitting the pieces together.
Also, the top rib (rib-501) is supposed to wrap the side ribs (502-L and 502-R), but they really doesn’t fit together when I do that, so I reversed the wrapping to let 502 wrap around 501. Then the pieces fit together much better.