3 hrs. misc. work on center fuselage.

Riveting the floor ribs to the front of the GMC.

After riveting I found that the flap tube was a bit tight and here you can see why.  A little bit skewed to the front.  So more filing of the front of the slot (with the closing rib on).

With that done it was time to enlist the family to help put the center fuselage on it's side to rivet from the bottom.

Other side view.

View inside the GMC.

The holes in the aileron stops are 4mm and the skin is 3.2, so here I'm reaming it out to 4.

And it's done!

Other side view.

Time to put on the triangle thingies...  Note that each had a hole which needed to be drilled though the skin.

Done and riveted.  I held off on riveting the hole closest to the main spar since I wasn't sure if that might get in the way of positioning the spar.

Full view on the topside.

Down and the main spar in place.  I may need to remove the flap tube one more time in order to rivet the floor ribs to the main spar.  Also, my aileron servo pushrod seems too long so I'll need to investigate.

Front view.

3 hrs. finishing up the fitting, working on the front elevator stop and starting the next stage of riveting in place the floor ribs in front of the GMC.

Did some final filing and the tube fittings are done.

Took out the outer ribs so I could work on the front elevator stop install.

You can see the gap I had to bridge.

Using my handy Tight Fit drill extension to drill the ribs.

The drill with the extension.

Fabricating the shims.

Shims made.

Shims in place and ready for reaming out to size and riveting.

And they're riveted in place!

Ribs back in to rivet to the front of the GMC.  Tomorrow will be riveting the ribs to the GMC, the final check of the tube fitting and riveting all the closing brackets in place.

3 hrs. starting to rivet the floor ribs to the gear mounting channel and continued fitting of the elevator and flap tubes.

For the front elevator stop I needed to grind away some metal to make room for the rivet.  Still need to make some shims and drill the holes through the ribs.

Because of the flange banging to get the GMC to fit under these ribs the alignment with the heavy metal piece (I forget the part #) was not that great so it took lots of cleco's and coaxing to get the best alignment of the holes.  Still needed to ream them out though.

All the rivets that can be done at this stage are done.

The holes into the front of the GMC also didn't have great alignment.

Wise to keep the main spar away from the action so you have room to work.

I checked the flap tube installed and it was still binding so I took off the end bushings to see the spacing.  You can see the misalignment of the flap tube with the slot.  Need to grind the backside (both sides of the fuselage).

Like this...

Got the flap tube to turn easily, so now it was time to work on the elevator tube.  You can see here the front side needs grinding.  It was actually worse than this because you can see I forgot to cleco the flange to the GMC.   The procedure was to do this then take out the tube and grind the hole.  Then try again...  It takes several iterations..  At least for me it does...

The manual shows this closing rib on the other side of the floor rib, but it can't go there because of the heavy piece already in place.

Been feeling a bit under the weather, so haven't worked on the plane.  My next tasks though are to rivet the ribs to the front of the gear mounting channel, rivet the front elevator stop to the ribs and then continue work on the flap and elevator tube fittings.  Once that's done it'll be time to rivet on all the closing ribs.

.5 hrs. doing not much...  Feeling slightly under the weather today I wasn't in the mood to hang out in the garage, but I still did a bit.

Contemplating my approach for attaching the front elevator stop to the ribs.  There's a gap, there are no holes in the ribs and it's slightly blocking a hole in the rib that will be getting a rivet to attach the closing rib.  First I need to rivet the ribs to the GMC (Gear Mounting Channel) so that it is in it's final position, then I need to grind away a bit of the stop to allow for the rivet head.  Then I need to fabricate some shims to bridge the gaps and drill holes in them lining up with the stop's holes.  I'll need to figure out how to locate and drill the holes in the ribs, then they'll be riveted.

So I feel like I did something today I riveted the other elevator stop on the GMC.  Because of all the flange bending and forcing in this area, a lot of the holes visible in this photo don't line up well.  Will probably need to enlarge these to the next size up rivets (though I want to make sure there won't be any spacing issues on the inside of the GMC).

1 hr. riveting the floor ribs to the gear mounting channel (GMC) (backside) and its uprights.

The floor ribs are riveted to the GMC from the outside.  The rivets on the top will be riveted from inside the GMC.

The instructions say to rivet these from outside the GMC, but the bottom 4 are countersunk and are riveted from the inside.  The next one up is a domed rivet and I've seen photos of it being riveted from the inside, so I did the same.  The rest are riveted from the outside.

Investing why the 2 tubes here are tight, so I removed the outside bushing and we can see that the slots are clearly not coaxial.

Removed the tubes and using a steel rod we can see the problem.  Note how the two closer ribs are touching the rod, but the middle two are at least a 1/4 inch away.  This happened because if you recall I had to do some serious flange bending to get the channel to fit under those two middle ribs so it brought the slots closer to the channel.  So, working from the center out I will start riveting the ribs to the GMC and then get a more accurate measurement of how off the two center ribs are.  Then I will have to grind down the left sides of slots (bottoms seen here and the closing ribs which are not in the picture).

Updated the Links page to include a couple more build logs I know about.  If I'm missing yours and you'd like it listed, please let me know.