Main and Rear Spar Carry-Thrus

Posted On September 8, 2019

I’ve been quite busy the last week with family and friends so I only had an hour here or there to make progress on the plane. Most of the work has been on attachment of the spar carry-thrus to the center fuselage. Those are attached now, so I think the next step is to rotate the assembly onto its side to attach the forward floor channels to the bottom skin.

These brackets (CF-BKT-023-L/R) that sit on the main gear channel are quite thick and weren’t perfectly formed. I had to spend some effort with a hammer fixing the flanges to make them flat (see next pic)
The red arrows indicate where these brackets were bulging a bit and needed some hammering to flatten them
After adjustment, the brackets fit better. Still, I had holes that didn’t line up, especially the three holes that go into the upper surface of the main gear channel.
This elevator control stop (CT-STO-001-X-A-) needed some notches cut into it for an adjacent rivet to have room to form properly
CT-STO-001-X-A-: not sure what happened here, but the holes in the bracket don’t match the holes in the skin. One of the parts is a newer revision? I wound up drilling new holes in the skin to line up with the outer holes in the bracket
Aileron control stop CT-STO-003-X-A-. The holes for the bracket were 4.0mm but the holes in the skin were drilled to 3.2mm so I had to open them up with a reamer
Only after I had already riveted these brackets did I realize I needed to leave the red circled holes open – there’s a close out bracket that comes in a later step. The manual really should have a note about this! It was not easy to drill out these rivets, I had to use a right-angle adapter. Also in this pic, the purple circle shows why the notches were needed in the elevator control stop
Main gear uprights riveted in.. lots of rivets. I put these in before attaching the main spar carry-thru, which is not the order the manual states; my thinking was that these rivets would be harder to access once the main spar carrythru is attached (…I was right!)
Installing the rivets for the main spar carry-thru from underneath, not the easiest angle to work from.
Floor ribs riveted into the main spar carry-thru webbing. Pretty tight quarters here to get my rivet tools into!
I attached these support tooling brackets after riveting in the carry-thru. Notice the holes drilled 1-2-3-4-5 into these brackets? Nice thoughtful detail!

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