Week 52: Rear Fuselage

I am now officially one year into this project! Overall I am happy with my progress, but I definitely was going faster at first and slowed down over the summer. I am looking forward to getting my pace back up and seeing everything come together.

This week I got as far as I can for now with assembling the rear fuselage. I have the longerons riveted to the floor and have the rib 1 assembly attached. When test fitting that assembly I noticed a potential issue. I could not get the finished rib assembly to fit over the combined longeron 8 assembly. The vertical flange on the tie down bracket and the angle piece limited the movement of the rib assembly, and at the same time the bottom flange on rib 901 had to fit over the longeron while the notch in the ribs also had to fit over it.

What I decided to do was not rivet the different parts of the longeron 8 assembly until after fitting the rib assembly over it. I just put in one cleco joining the two longerons and the tie down bracket. That let me rotate the shorter longeron to allow the ribs to be manipulated around them. Once it was in place I rotated the longeron back in place and added additional clecos and added the angle bracket. While test fitting I verified I could get to all the rivets. This method worked well and it kept me from having to drill out any rivets to get all the parts in place.

I am still waiting on word of when to expect the replacement corner bracket I need. That is going to keep me from installing any more parts, so in the meantime I am going to work forward prepping/priming parts. For now I attached the first couple of rib assemblies that I do have complete. It is starting to look like (the back of) an airplane!