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Finished up riveting the sides on the center section bulkhead and riveted on the spacers. The next step is to rivet on a few brackets, but they need to be primed first. I’m going to wait until I have a larger batch before I prime.
I moved on to the next bulkhead, F-705. I hunted down the numerous parts for that, and started fabricating the various pieces. I decided to do all of the fabrication for this bulkhead up front. Some parts are as easy as cutting a piece of angle, or as difficult as cutting a taper on some bar stock. It took about 4 hours to measure out all of the cuts, cut them on the band saw, and then clean them up with the sander and Scotchbrite wheel. Here’s a picture of the F-705 parts ready for drilling.
Adele helped me get all of the gooey, sticky labels off of the parts. I don’t know why Van’s uses such nasty labels.
After that I started back-drilling the lower assembly. The instructions say to just drill everything out, but it’s obviously easier to clamp on one pieces at a time, drill it, cleco it, and then do the next part. [Note: Look ahead to Oct 7th to see a mistake I made here. Be careful when cutting and positioning the doubler bars that you have enough edge distance on the hole at the inboard (pointy) end.]
The next step is to drill the seat belt attach brackets. I drilled a hole in all of the right brackets using the dimensions on the plans. I then clecoed it to the bulkhead. I used a piece of scrap as a 3/16″ spacer and clamped on the other bracket. After carefully lining it up, I clamped the undrilled bracket to the bulkhead and then back drilled. I stopped for the night in the middle of that process.
