Yesterday I finished up with the fuselage inventory and got all of the hardware organized and put away. This was no small chore, given Van's method for "organizing" things. They bag things in sub-kits (which I fail to see a rhyme or reason for many times), which means instead of just giving you a bag of 50 bolts of a certain type, they spread those 50 bolts around in 20 different bags. For bolts, that's not a huge deal, but when it comes to washers, cotter pins, nuts, etc...what a nightmare. I spent most of the last two days going through the bags, then putting similar items into smaller bags.
When it was all said and done, my workbenches were littered with bags of hardware.
I went to Home Depot and bought two more stackable organizer/bins. For the most part, I was able to get all of the rivets in one, bolts in another (not enough space for each bolt type to have a separate bin, but all of the same size share a bin - drilled shank, no drilled shank), washers and nuts in another, etc.
Thanks to my high school drafting class, reading the plans and figuring out how to fabricate things like this is relatively easy.
Unfortunately, all of the firewall stiffeners are on back order. I have many of the other parts, but without the stiffeners I can't really work on them since they all tie together. I have no idea how long the back ordered parts are going to take to ship. The firewall is stainless steel and has very sharp edges, so I went ahead and sanded down all of the edges to minimize my chance of blood loss.
Since that whole firewall section can't be done, I moved on to the center bulkhead. This is the bulkhead that takes all of the loads for the wings.
The center bulkhead(s) need a bunch of 5/8" holes drilled to allow snap bushings for future wire runs. Some of these are already located with smaller pre-punched holes, but others just have to be measured and drilled fresh.
I clecoed the center section sides (both fore and aft) to the bulkheads. The instructions say to also use the NAS bolts to positively locate everything in the exact right position before match drilling. These bolts fit extremely tightly, as I would expect given that they will eventually attach the wing spar to the center bulkhead. I drilled everything to final size and disassembled, read for deburring, countersinking, etc.
