Saturday December 20, 2008
Finished F-704 Bulkheads, Started F-705 (Bulkheads)
7.2 Hours

This morning, I started by drilling and attaching the nutplates on the front F-704 piece.

Then, I drilled the two web stiffeners and the four seat cover support ribs.

After deburring everything and prepping for priming, I primed the web stiffeners...

...and the control column mounts. I didn't prime the seat cover support ribs, cause they're all alclad.

After the primer dried and I could use the garage again, I started riveting the side supports to the horizontal F-704 assemblies. I used my c-frame and the riveting gun to do these. Every single rivet came out perfect using this method. You can see that I was using the NAS bolts again to assure perfect alignment.

Here's the other side of one of them.

Then, I riveted and bolted all of the cover support ribs, web stiffeners, and control column mounts to the F-704 sections.

Here's the front of the forward F-704 section (recall that the two F-704 sections later sandwich the main spars from the wings).

The back of the forward section.

The back of the aft section. Dan Checkoway mentions that you end up removing these control column mounts again at some point, so I didn't bother to torque the bolts.

And finally, the front of the aft section. You can see the angled bar stock riveted in the ends. I ended up back-riveting the rivets that hold these in place.

Then, I got to work on the F-705 bulkhead. First, you trim this bar to 45 3/32" and mark a center line on it.

Then I spent a while scratching my head over how to align the F-705B bar with the F-705A spar and the F-705C doublers. Here they are loosely laid in place. The rear wing spars eventually get bolted in place in the gap between F-705B and F-705C.

I was tired by this point and not entirely sure that I'd get things lined up right if I continued, so I stopped for the night. Mike Bullock's RV-7 site has some good advice for getting things aligned, so I'll use that tomorrow.

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