Fuselage Riveting...Never Ending

Another short session of riveting with Rose.  Closer and closer to flipping the canoe!

Fuselage - Seat Ribs to Side Skins

One more chunk of riveting done!  Today we riveted the rivets that hold the outer seat ribs to the side skins.  The next session will be the double line of rivets that hold the tailcone to the center section.  After that, there are just a few hard to reach rivets in the forward fuselage to clean up and then it'll finally be time to roll the canoe.

Back At It - Fuselage Riveting

Slowly but surely, the fuselage riveting is coming along.  There's still a bit to do, but I figure it's better to do it slowly in order to continue to have a happy wife!  I'll ramp the speed up again once the fuselage is flipped back over and I can work solo.  In preparation for flipping it, I made a table to set the fuselage onto.  I could just flip the fuselage and keep it on saw horses, but I think having it set closer to the ground will make working on it much easier.  I grabbed the wooden box that the nose gear came in, then cut my old bench top in half (the sacrificial bench top I made for the ailerons and flaps) and mounted them together on top of some scrap boards.  I found 4 old wheels, so decided to use them as well.  Given my limited shop space, I think I'll want to have the ability to roll the fuselage around as I work on different portions of it.  The stand will sit under the spar carry through section.  I'll also have to build some sort of a stand to hold the tail level, but I don't know what height to make that yet.

Rose helped with a bunch more riveting, but we did get held up in a number of areas.  Some rivets are nearly impossible to get a bucking bar onto, like these two rivets in the firewall angle that are pretty much right up against the large piece of angle.  I'll have to look around and see if I can find some random piece of metal that will work to buck these.  There are a dozen rivets in the forward section with access issues like this.

The same goes here - two rivets in the bulkhead flange that are right on top of the piece of angle.

Even though we had to skip some of the areas that are harder to access, we still got a lot done.  The forward floor is mostly done, minus the rivets in the side skin that connect everything to the engine mount.  The one thing I really dislike about the design of the floor is the floor stiffeners.  Van's bends the floor stiffeners on each end so they'll go up and over angle pieces at the firewall and the wing spar bulkhead.  It works fine, but trying to put a jog in pieces of aluminum angle just doesn't make for a pretty outside skin because the pieces don't actually jog enough to be perfectly flat.  The skins have pretty good dimples at these rivets because of it.  They're on the bottom at least, so not visible.  If I were to do it over again, I'd probably redesign the stiffeners and make them out of multiple pieces so they lie flat though.  Next plane I guess.

With the front portion largely finished, we moved to the rear.  We riveted the corner pieces to the baggage bottom skin and started riveting the baggage side skin stiffeners.  The only remaining areas to work on are the center section to tailcone connection, the bottom and side skin edges of the baggage area, and the outer seat rib and side skin riveting.  Once we do that and finish up the hard to reach rivets, it'll be time to flip the canoe!