4 hours.
Combination entry for today and yesterday. Got the roll bar channels all riveted up. This involved some priming, again a lovely shade of Colonial Marine drab.
Here are the major parts, drying in the sun. For those of you in the cold crappy states like the one I’m from, it was 74 degrees F, sunny, and calm. Perfect paint weather. I’m not as anal about priming as I used to be, but since this stuff is pretty well inaccessible once it’s riveted together, a light coat of primer might help, especially since I live right near the coast, where the salty marine layer infiltrates everything.
With the channels clamped back to the board for flatness, I riveted the upper strap of the forward channels. They have you do the forward channels with AN-426 solid flush rivets, since you can get at them with a squeezer.
The next part of the process is obvious; you rivet on all the stuff you can with the channels apart, like the attach angle. This is the aft side now, and at this point, I’ve blind-riveted in betwen those sections of clecoes.
When you’re done, you get this. Forward part is all flush AN rivets, aft is CS4-4 blind rivets.
Here’s the result, resting in place. The next part of the op is going to be fitting the attach angles, then drilling/bolting them to the fuselage.
As far as I can tell, the dimensions look good. The angle brackets at the bottom of the roll bar plus the roll bar make up the width of the fuselage at that point. I think I might still have to shave a few thousanths off to match the contour of the longeron, and to keep the skin sitting flush, but it looks good so far.
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