Forward Fuse

OK,  I haven't been posting much lately, but I have been working quite a bit.   The forward fuse work seems to be a bit rough when you compare it to the rest of the kit.   The instructions are vague and the order seems to be something that can be adjusted quite a bit to meet your needs.  I personally am waiting until I have all the parts fitting nicely before I do any of the drilling for the bolts and other "key" items.  There is a lot of fabrication and finessing in the forward fuse..   I won't go into details, but I will tell you to take it slow here if you are building.   I have found that myself as many others needed to order new parts as you burn through this section..   Here is a pic of the right side, which is the furthest along.   You can see I have most everything fit here.

Here is the forward view of the skin stiffeners.  You fabricate an Angle and connect it to the firewall.   I used my angle drill here for the hole through the firewall.  The two holes in the short angle are drilled per plans, then I used my angle drill to come up from the bottom into the skin stiffener.   I know it sounds confusing, but if you were working on it in this stage, you would get what I am saying.  ;-)

 

Here is where the Gear Web attaches to the forward bulkhead on the right side.   You can see that mine didn't match up perfectly, so I am going to put a thin shim in there.   The bulkhead is supposed to be bent so the web is perpendicular to the aircraft centerline, and my gear web is correctly proportioned in all other areas, I the bend was just created a bit short,  This shim will take care of it.  The pic below on the right shows the gear web as it slides in next to the outer skin.   I think this is mainly for -a models where the tricycle landing gear mounts here.  For mine, being a tail dragger, the main gear will be part of the engine mount further forward, so this is probably additional beefing up that isn't fully required, but they have you put it in anyway.   For extra strength and if you ever decide to convert to a tricycle gear later.