Preparing for top front skin installation

TLDR

• Prepared top front skin installation

Detail

In order to know precisely where the avionics rack will position, I needed to have the top front skin in place.

I haven’t finished the work like cabin heater or throttle cable yet, so it’s not the time to fully close the top skin. So I spent the last few nights to prepare everything, just minus the actual riveting part.

Test fitting

The top front skin I received goes into the side skin, not covering it. That makes things easier to align. It didn’t take me too long on this part.

Once I set the skin in place, the rear half is fine, but the front half couldn’t sit fully inside the side skin. So I used a pencil to draw how much I needed to cut.

Then I took it off and removed some skin material using dremel cutoff wheel. It’s really messy. Dust everywhere.

As I cut the top skin I kept putting it back on the fuselage to test fit. There is always a gap between the skin and the firewall. I managed to make it smaller, but I don’t want to cut the composite material too much, so I am thinking I will push it down and use rivet to pull them together when the time comes.

Drilling holes

Then I match drilled the holes on the top half of the firewall, as well as holes on the top skin.

Drilling the composite skin took really long time. I used a hole finder to locate where to drill.

Countersink

After all the holes are drilled, I countersunk all holes except the row on avionics rack.

This step is not as painful as drilling but still took a long time, and also very dusty.

Test fitting the dash

Once all the holes are prepared and clecoed, I put the top dash in place to check its fitment.

I didn’t spent too much time on this, but overall it seemed to have a good fitment.