Last Skin is on!

This week (odd how its become a weekly thing now) was kinda fun because I am starting to wrap up the fuselage.  See what I mean in pictures...  Lots of pictures but they don't tell the whole story as I forget to take pictures until I am needing a break.

See that strip of aluminum in the upper left corner of the picture?  Well, that's what this strip of aluminum looked like at first.  After lots of measuring and cutting this is the rough shape it will take.

And here is that same piece of aluminum after I have cleaned it up and started drilling holes.  This is the strip that will get riveted to the forward side of the fuselage and will hold the receptacles for the quarter-turn fasteners that will hold the cowling on.

I laid the top piece of the cowling on the air-frame just to see what it would look like. Lots of trimming to do yet.

Here you can see the aluminum strip cleco'd in place with plastic covering the engine.

I needed to cut the air vent holes for the 80mm fans that I will be mounting.  Here they are all cut and drilled.  Now I can finish up this last skin and get it riveted on.

hmmm, I might need to do a little more trimming on the wind screen.

Painted the interior portion of the top skin since it will not be paint-able once I put the wind screen in place.  This is the same paint as the interior which is a non glossy dark color so I minimize glare. UPDATE:  I removed the brown paint on Sunday and redid it with a flat back that seems to work a little better.  No pictures of that yet.

Got the skirt support strips riveted in place in preparation for gluing the skirt in place.

And here the skirt is glued and cleco'd in place.  Still have to countersink, rivet and then finish the exterior surface of the skirt but so far its looking pretty good.

Finally, here is the skirt riveted to the slider frame.  Not a bad fit, but now I have to dress up and finish the exterior side of the skirt.  That will have to wait for a bit.

Here is the fit from the back side after riveting.

Ok, this is probably not true but this rivet was the last one that Travis and Mariah helped me put in on Saturday.  The top skin is installed!  The only rivets left are for the firewall and those have to wait until I get the cowling trimmed and fitted.

Top skin riveted on.  Now I can install the windshield.

I took the time to install the handles on the roll-bar before I glued the windshield on.  You would think this would be a quick install but as expected it took much longer than I anticipated to get the holes drilled properly and in the correct alignment.

Sunday Amy and I decided to go out for breakfast...in Bremerton!  We flew Harry's Cessna to Bremerton and had these pancakes, and this is not the big batch!

After breakfast we decided to take a round-about route home that went over the Tahoma Ridge property down in the Eatonville area.  Very pretty country.