Got a few hours to work on the plane today. I temporarily fit the roll bar.  Here you can see the bracket doesn’t fit one top of the flange. For the tip up canopy it needs to be trimmed.  Here I’ve marked where I need to cut the metal.  This is after I’ve removed the…

Tonight I spend a couple hours in the shop. I began by installing the static ports to the side of the fuselage.  This is the exterior. It sits about 1/32th of an inch higher than the skin. There’s another one on the other side of the fuse.  Here you can see the two static ports…

Tonight I spent about 3 hours working on the rollbar. It’s a very tedious job and requires a lot of precision.  I began by placeing the plate I made last week onto the two rear channels. After measuring and checking the width of the rollbar I drilled the plate to the channels and clecoed it…

This weekend I got in a few hours of work and finished off the tailcone. It was quite a lot of work aligning and measuring the tail wheel mount. It needs to be aligned perfectly so that when I drill vertical stab to the assembly, I meet all the edge distance requirements.  Here’s the weldment…

Another day working on the weldment and the fit of the tail wheel mount. Being a quick build fuselage, all of this work has to be done somewhat out of order.  Here’s the weldment aligned and drilled to match the bulkhead. These were measured and originally drilled to #30 so that I could hold it…

Tonight I spent a couple hours fitting the tail wheel spring mount in the fuse. It is not fun.  The template fits nicely, I then transferred the cutout to the metal and began by drilling the curved part using a unibit. I then proceeded to cut the straighter part using some snips and got it…

This update is for yesterday and today.  I began by finally getting the fuse up on the rotisserie. It was quite the effort but totally worth it.  It’s about 2ft higher off the ground and much easier to work on. Rotating it to the orientation I need will be extremely valuable.  I followed this by…

Today I got out the parts for the rudder pedal assembly. I’m only going with pilot side brakes so I only had to deal with one set of parts. I started by getting out the brake pedal plates and assorted parts. I just got a bench top bandsaw which made life SO MUCH BETTER! I…

Didn’t get much time in the shop yesterday, but I did spend about an hour removing all the temporary rivets holding the interior panels in place. I drilled out about 50 pop rivets, and removed the seat floors and baggage area floors, along with the two side panels where the flap weldment will be mounted.…