Undercarriage Channel

Fresh back from a week of vacation on Cape Cod, I resumed work on the center fuselage. On Sunday I worked on page E3, which assembles the rear bottom assembly, undercarriage channel, and main spar assembly onto the bottom skins. Quite a few big and substantial assemblies here, but that’s because most of the weight of the aircraft is supported in this area.

Riveting together the rear floor ribs using the nose piece extension for my Milwaukee rivet gun

I spent a lot of time with the flanges on ribs CF-RIB-001-L / R, which were not formed properly and made it impossible to slide the undercarriage channel into place. I had to bang on them with a hammer and shape with a seamer for quite some time; overall I needed to make the opening between the flanges 1.7 mm wider. After some elbow grease and a bunch of swearing, I got the channel in place.

The flanges on Rib 001 that surround the channel weren’t formed to correct dimensions so I had to bend them into shape
Finally got the channel to slide in!
Me and my rivet gun! Unfortunately I also had a use a manual riveter inside the channel since there wasn’t enough room to fit the rivet gun inside
Page E3 step 1 mostly done. I added the support brace too.
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