Prepping, Etching & Priming

I wish all the parts were as flat as this when it comes to sanding, but that would make for a strange looking contraption which I'm sure I wouldn't want to attempt to get off the ground.

Not the best photo, but this is F-01475 - the top skin.

And this.....the bottom of the fuselage plus some other aft fuselage parts I prepped at the same time.

My cleaning table...

                                                 1. Spray with Stewart Systems EkoEtch

                                                 2. Leave 4-5mins

                                                 3. Wash off thoroughly with water

                                                 4. Leave to dry

                                                 5. Ready to prime

Not that it's a huge issue, but I decided to mask the back of the rivet holes so the primer wouldn't spray through and cause mess. Blue plastic and the green painter's tape looks good.

All lined up ready to paint.

The three bulkheads in the top left have already been primed once, but I noticed the curve flange edges hadn't been rounded off. I hit them with the Scotchbrite wheel and here they are again.

All primed with Stewart Systems EkoPrime white.

This part is great! All deburred, sanded, etched primed and dried. Now they're ready to go together - the easy part.......and the fast.

The manual suggests placing these bulkheads upside down on a couple of work-horses. To save a little space, I decided to clamp some planks under the bench which worked fine.

Yep - below is an optical illusion. It's actually the floor panel which is a large triangle as shown in the next photo down.

Now, this is an interesting section as I didn't notice anything strange while wasting all that time deburring, sanding difficult shapes, etching and then priming parts that ultimately are scrap.

Notice anything weird?

How about this angle?...

Yep, the holes should be on the flat section. Obviously, the holes were punched in a flat section, and then inserted into the press back the front.

As per usual, Vans were great. Apart from the fact the mistake was made in the first place, They acknowledged the issue straight away with the following:

"I’m glad you caught this!  We had a few of these get out but we didn’t know the builders that received them!  That’s definitely mis-punched."

Fair enough, I guess once they get packed into boxes and leaves the shed, it's impossible to know where they go. If someone does actually find a way to install them, I'd be interested to see it.

Shaping the Aft Bottom Skin cutout

This was one of those steps I wasn't looking forward to as I thought it was going to take much longer and be much more difficult than it actually was. Needed to turn this...

into this...

I started cutting out as much as I possibly could with the bandsaw without going too close to the template traced onto the skin.

The zoomed out photo looks better as the other nicely in-line holes are in contrast to the messy cuts required at the tail end.

Thought I'd take a short break (as my fingers were getting tired) and remove strips of blue plastic over the rivet holes.

Here we go. Not fitted yet, but looks good after all the manual filing, sanding and deburing...

I was happy with the symmetry.

All cleaned and ready to prime.

Aft Fuselage Bulkhead Assembly

Today I continued on with riveting the bulkheads. All the below parts played nice so didn't have any issues riveting.

F-01410 Bulkhead

As I could get the pneumatic squeezer to all of these rivets, these parts were very easy to get consistent rivets.

Here we - all the internal rivets done...

...from the front...

F-01408 Bulkhead from the rear

Below I've riveted the two small bulkheads and the Battery Angles have been riveted onto the Bellcrank ribs.

F-01406 Bulkhead with all the nutplates attached...

Here are a couple of close-ups of the little suckers...

Ahhh, some more nice flush rivets.

I had a little time left over so thought I'd get the bottom and top skins out to begin preparing...