Day 43

Today we were kind of all over the place. Worked on a few different assemblies.

We started with the luggage compartment access frame. This was a straightforward assembly. You just had to make sure all the pieces were in the correct place and order. The only part we were not able to finish was the door itself. We are still waiting for the hinge. Once it comes, we can fit it to the fuselage. But that's not a make-or-break kind of thing right now. So on to other things.

We next moved onto finishing the parachute box. We will not be installing our parachute at first. We just want it as an option later. But we do want everything to be there, done and ready to go for when we do. We clear drilled and riveted the remaining holes along the top of the rear fuselage around the parachute opening. We also cut out and installed the foam parts using 3M High Strength 90 contact glue. We also put the ballistics mounting plates and bolts where they would go. When we install the canopy, we will wrap and secure the cables as well. Lastly was putting these three plastic tubes in the bottom of the box. These proved protection to the parachute bag from any water, keeps it from wearing on the bottom, and helps with noise. They were kind of a pain in the neck (literally and figuratively...) You cut the three pieces to fit in the bottom, measure out where to put the rivets, cut out access holes to put a rivet, drill them down inside the bottom (with very limited access, because well, it a one foot by one foot box) and then try to fit a drill and rivet puller down in there and do this for three pieces each with three rivets. lots of patients and sweat. All that will be left now though will be the blow out cover. We went to the internet to debate using M3 button head screws and rivet nuts to hold the cover on for easy access later but were quickly shot down in our creativity. (People on the internet can be vicious... haha) Thats okay. It will all work out.

While we were going around inspecting our work, we did notice that when we were putting our top skins on, we forgot to underlap them beneath the center fuselage side skins. Normally you would have the rear fuselage all skinned before joining to the center fuselage, but we held off for ease of access to a few other things. Which is perfectly fine, just need to remember to put the skin underneath. We were able to drill out between the 6-10 rivets on either side and thankfully had not riveted the luggage transition rib yet. With that we were able to tuck the skin underneath. Phew. Crisis averted. Glad we caught it before we installed the canopy.