I’m excited that our house is done for so many reasons, but one of the numerous benefits is that Jess is free to goof off a bit more! In the first of the sessions, her and our mascot Percy came down to the hanger for a quick session on the firewall where we cleaned and deburred all the reinforcement pieces. Nothing major to report here. After Jess got reacquainted with the polishing wheel, she was off and running!
Our second session of the week was a birthday session! The whole family got involved (including my mom for the first time!!), and James provided much needed additional supervision as we worked two different projects at the same time. My mom, Nico, and James continued work on the firewall. The major task was final size drilling all the various holes, of which there are a variety. Nutplate holes got #40 treatment while the reinforcement doubler holes were #30. Since I am doing the inflight adjustable pedals we also added the 1/4” hole for that assembly. The instructions were right that using a lot of cutting oil during that drilling helped keep the heat down. The stainless steel firewall is a different beast than the typical aluminum. Hopefully the 1/4” bit is still sharp!
The other project was getting all the pieces together for the fwd floor assembly, and starting the clean up of all the edges etc. Jack and Jess were on that project and patiently waded through the shelves of mixed parts to successfully find all of them. By the end of the night, all the part’s edges were smooth and ready for next steps.
I’m definitely finding (and was told before) that the fuselage projects are much more intellectual as each assembly is unique and requires a certain amount of preparation to understand what is actually going on. This is a diversion from the more repetitive tasks the wings provided. As I progress in the fuselage work, I’m starting to think I’ll need a purpose built fuselage table soon. Time to break out the 8020 and put something together. I wonder if Finn is available for a 8020 consulting session?? Until then… Happy Building!!
2 comments
I need to mark that part that I drilled the holes in…so I can say I drilled those holes !
Nice progress.