Firewall / Rear bulkhead / Front door sills

4 years ago

| Working on: Fuselage

| Tagged: firewall

| Build time: 5 hr

Firewall

Drilled all boltholes for firewall this morning, including engine mount bolts. Didn’t have small enough AN3 bolts so will order these. Currently held in place by clecos. This now allows me to start planning locations of firewall mounted items.

Rear Bulkhead

I had already made a rear bulkhead from sheet aluminum 0.025. Yesterday I added some beads with a bead roller, however this warped the bulkhead and made it look pretty unsatisfactory. As a trial I purchased a sheet of Corflute and cut it to shape using the original as a template. It was very easy to work with, very light weight, and looks good. Will decide over the next few days if it will hold up for the longer term.

Front Door Sills

I’ll be modifying the doors to a seaplane or gull-wing door. This requires raising the lower door sill height so the door can clear the wing strut. To do this I purchased (2) 50x50mm lengths of cedar and shaped them to fit. This seems to be the easiest way to raise the sill, using the existing parts. Currently I have shaped most of the cedar and it looks good.

These rivets were in the wrong place from the factory and prevented the firewall from sitting flush on the airframe. The solution was to drill them out and replace with flush head rivets.

My experiment using a sheet of corflute for the rear bulkhead.

Door sills were raised 50mm (2 inches) using cedar.

Firewall / Rear bulkhead / Front door sills

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