Home Preparation Empennage Wings Fuselage Finish Kit Favorite Links W & B Calculator Van's Aircraft Email Me

Fuselage March 2005 Updates March 25, 2005 F-705 Bulkhead Getting started on this I looked at Dave Parsons site. Lot of fabricating on this part. Nothing really major except some cuts with the bandsaw and smoothing. I laid out the parts first and started cutting on the tappered bent pieces. I used my pneumatic diegrinder to smoothout the metal bar stock. Next I cut the 2 shims that create the space between the long bar and tappered pieces. The bottom of the bulkhead is predrilled so I just clamped it down over the barstock and used it as the drilling template. #30 holes for the rivets and #12 for the seatbelt brackets. This worked well just clamping down the bulkhead over the bar and clecoing as I went. I figured it would be easier to remove the bottom bulkhead to provide a tighter clamp of the tappered pieces to the long bar to drill those holes. Good thing I have this vaccum to suck up all of these drill shavings. There must be 5 pounds in there now. It was getting late but I was on a roll so I started on the seatbelt brackets. These are kind of tricky so I used another Dave P tip. I used a 3/16 inch scrap piece to give the proper spacing against the bar and clamped it in place using the cleco clamps. These hold really tight. Next I put a bolt thru the end holes to keep the holes square. I added another piece of scrap close to the bolt to keep the space. I got 2 done but the next 2 are going to have to be trimmed down so I stopped for the night. This website was built to document my work in compliance with the FAA requirements needed to certify my aircraft. My experiences and comments are by no means to be considered as instructions on how to build any aircraft.