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Bryan, I hope I'm not too late, I just got to F11 and realized that I'd already updrilled to #30 the holes in lower cross tie #1, through the aft skin. In your pictures it looks like you've not updrilled them, and that's a good thing. It will make matching the forward and aft skins easier on F11. The plans on F21 do say to updrill at this stage (i counted all 194 rivet holes), but it's better to wait on those particular holes.

Robbie,
That is awesome, like we have our own little club. Chicagoland Sonex builders that riveted the bottom of the box on first. Is Tony with us too?

Ryan,
I have not updrilled the front of the tailcone box. Made sense to me that we updrill when we mate the fuselage halves.

Scott,
Thanks again for speaking up. I am glad I post a lot of pictures as you guys have caught some of my mistakes.

So on the box I just did a control-Z. Then Adam riveted on the top. All is well.


Sadly all my cordless drill batteries are dying. I need to replace them but am too cheap. Had to pull out my dad's old Craftsman with the aluminum body and missing ground plug. Though it sparks like an electric train coming into the station and turns slow, it drilled out all those rivets. I think the slow speed helps.


Matthew and I were building his loft bed this AM and he raised the question of how many drills I have. I have 11! Never thought to count them before.

Edit: forgot to mention that we did accidentally updrill the cross ties where the turtledeck formers go. I communicated poorly with Adam, he was happily boring along with his new friend, Mr. Snake drill, while I was cursing the stainless rivets I was drilling out of the box.

Nice recovery!

It's hard enough to get the nut up in the small space of the cross tie box for the splice plates from below can only imagine it would be next to impossible to do it correctly the way you guys were going! :roll:

You'll have the riveted up soon and the turtle deck will go quickly!

Bryan Cotton wrote:Edit: forgot to mention that we did accidentally updrill the cross ties where the turtledeck formers go. I communicated poorly with Adam, he was happily boring along with his new friend, Mr. Snake drill, while I was cursing the stainless rivets I was drilling out of the box.

You should be ok, the turtledeck formers don't have laser-cut holes anyway so they must be clamped into position. just use a lot of clamps (are you also the clamp king?) and you should be able to drill straight to #30 without issue.

Updrilling a bunch of tailcone parts.
Whoops, out of quota.

I got the note about posting photos. For now I just deleted a bunch.

We did a lot of drilling tonight - right hand seatbelt attach, shear web in the tailcone, and both tails to the Y fitting. This is my first attempt at photobucket from the iphone so if it goes well I will spam sonexbuilders a bunch more.


Edit: photobucket cuts off the right half in the preview. Have to click it to see the whole picture.

The good thing about making the upper angle on the Y tail breaker from scratch is you can sink the holes in from above. I used a piece of scrap from the 140 metalized wings (now fabric and 40 lbs less) to make a template, drew a couple lines 3/16" from the edge of the longeron, lined and clamped everything up, and drilled away.


I could not cleco in the Y fittings without removing the super thick doubler. Will it be hard to rivet, I wonder?

Still chugging along. Lots of holes in the tailcone.
Tailwheel bracket:


From the inside:


Splice plate to belly skin. I noticed the forward bottom channel came with 1/8" pilot holes - I wonder why? I drilled 3 holes in the belly skin up to #30 so I could cleco it.

On the upper and lower mount angles for the Y tail fitting (probably tailpost for you straight tail heathens) two of the bolts are close to the radius of the extrusion. The nut/washer were bridging and leaving a gap. We are replacing them with tapered shims made out of .125.