Prepping the F-1474 skins

Top skins have been prepped and primed, time to dimple and install. It's great to see the rear fuselage going together, but having the top skins on completes the picture.

Below, I'm dimpling on my home made dimpler and custom shelf that fits the dimpler.

Rivet lines cut out - time to cleco onto the frame!!

Awesome!

I can only assume CCR-264SS-3-2 has been specified due to the bulkhead directly behind. As I have a slim bucking bar that I could get into the gap, I decided to install AN426AD3-4 both sides of this nutplate.

It says don't rivet....

So I didn't rivet...

Or did I? Got a funny feeling I'll be drilling this nutplate out at some point. May as well leave it for now though.

Riveting the Top Skin Assembly (F-01475)

Riveting the centre spine rib (F-14131) onto the top skin meant back riveting. Normally, straight forward, I had an issue with this one being a slight separation during setting the rivet.

This next photo shows it a little better...

I had to drill those out and try again.

All done. No issues with the remainder.

A mate, Brent, dropped past to help out.

Vertical Stabiliser (trial) attach

Used some clamps to hold everything in place while I installed the AN4-6A bolts and temporary nuts to hold the Vert Stab on.

Ta-daaaa - just a trial unfortunately...

The centre hole here is the alignment hole while the other two are the match-drilled #12's

And the lower bolts holes deburred...

Not much more to do with the Vert Stab for a while now. Only have the top sections of the aft fuselage left before the whole project gets shelved while I find somewhere to expand to.

Dimpling the Top Skin...

Hmmm, that ain't going to work very well...

Had to shave a little off the dye so it wouldn't scrape the flange...

    

Here's the difference...

It's much easier doing these ones using the back plate and rivet gun.

Got to be careful though, as it's very easy to squish these too far...

Installing the Aft Deck

Continuing on with the Aft Deck, this rivet looks ok.......from the top side.

Not so good from here. Got a little bent sideways so had to drill this one out. I may have been able to salvage it if I could somehow get in from the other side, but that was too difficult and could've just made things worse.

At least access to the top of the rivet was very easy.

Perfect! Bang in the middle.

All done!! Looks quite good with the round rivet heads.

Sort of getting to see how the tail might almost look when it's on the plane. This obviously won't be really being installed for another 3ish years I'd be guessing.

Just thought I'd take a shot of before and after drilling the 1/4" hole which will no doubt hold the Vert Stab on...

Aft Fuselage Rear Deck

I prepped quite a few pieces this round saving on setup time.

This is the F-01414 - Aft Deck, primed and dimpled. Only the 8 holes shown here are AN426 type rivets, all the others are AN470 round head rivets.

...plus these four on the rear flange...

F-01409 Frame

I only noticed after I'd primed, that I hadn't rounded the faceted edges. Hence the next few shots here showing where I ran the edges over the Scotchbrite wheel.

I'm still amazed at how accurate the pre-punched parts are. Every now and then I need to run the drill through a hole to clear out some paint and maybe a tiny bit of aluminium, but for the most part all these parts fit together perfectly - Nice job Vans!!

This is page 10-27 - Aft Deck Installation

It's always satisfying finally putting these parts on to test fit, knowing how much work has gone into preparing the parts.

Yeah I know, the bench is really messy.

Had to find the longer 12" drill bit to ensure it was perpendicular to the face...

Even with the 12" bit, the drill was very close to rear flange.

This shows the angle I had to be on for the hole to be perpendicular to the face...

Drilling holes in the F-01411D Horizontal Stab Attach Bar Support Angle. This is one of the chunkiest pieces of angle in this part of the kit.

When you understand what it's attaching, I'm ok with that.

Now this one little rivet in the corner was trying to be difficult. I needed to contort the bucking bar into that small space to set that one.

Finally got to use my double offset cup rivet set - I knew there was a reason I bought it.

You can't have enough tools!!

Unfortunately, not everyone is competent in using them. Oh well, it's a learning experience. This one obviously came out...

Almost there.