| DTBR's Airplane Project Aft Fuselage |
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| Last Updated: 7/5/02 |
| Installation of the rear seat components and baggage shelf into the aft fuselage required a fair amount of work inside and outside ... at the same time. Even though I look really tall here, my brother-in-law, Scott, is inside the access hatch holding the drill block while I drill from the outside. |
| With the forward portion of the aft fuselage leveled and trued to the world, the tail structure is drilled and clecoed to make the entire assembly very rigid. This portion of the task took a bit longer than anticipated due to the tight working area in the tail cone. However, once this step was done, the aft fuselage assembly could be moved and rotated off the edge of the table in order to facilitate work on the rear seat sub-assembly. |
| After a long Saturday in the basement, the dancing girls arrived to help celebrate another milestone ... parts ready for debur and priming! Unfortunately, that's usually when all the help tends to leave. Even so, it has to be done. |
| Our new dog, Rusty, joined in as we celebrated the "move the fuse" milestone. In the background, you can see the aft fuselage rotated on our work table with the access hatch exposed on the bottom of the fuselage to my right. |
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| Nice drill block Scott! Thanks for the help! |
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| After all the help left, we debured and cleaned all the parts with dishsoap prior to priming. Here you see the majority of the aft fuselage laid out for priming in our makeshift paint booth in the garage. |
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| When the parts were all dry, we moved the components back into the basement where we riveted together the small subassemblies. We then clecoed together the floor, sides, and rear seat for some photo ops and to make a plywood template to be used during construction of the forward fuselage. At that point, we un-clecoed the rear fuselage and stored all the flat pieces until they are needed in the garage for final assembly. |