The Fuselage

Start - 9/9/99, Finish - 12/99

This plane already has many miles:
Oregon to the Philippines and back for initial construction.

Now it's off to California for the final steps













 

The fuselage ready to load at Van's factory
Overall workmanship on the fuselage was not as good as the wings.  Some visible rivets were too short and some were badly smeared to one side.  I will be drilling out and replacing a few of these.  Also, the tailwheel spring was very crooked, Van's said "mail it in, well give you a new one, no problem".

This was definitely easier than a year of building
(hope I didn't cheat myself out of some fun, though)
After fitting and drilling the F-810 bulkhead per Van's instructions, I basically went through the instructions until finding something that was not done yet .  Here is how it went:
 
  • Making the F-805C and F-805F floor braces/shims
  • Building the rear seat footwells and floor.
  • Building and installing the control column hanger.
  • Fitting and drilling the aft cabin side covers F-876
  • Building and installing the battery tray
  • Fitting and drilling the forward baggage compartment floor F-870
  • Building and drilling the throttle and right side console F-864, F-865
  • Installing the fuel selector valve bracket and valve F-883
  • Mid Cabin Covers F-881
  • Forward Seat Ramp and Ribs F-880
Skipped items are:
  • Routing the rudder cables
  • Flap bracket, actuator and weldment installation WD-806

Fuselage Floor -- Stiffened with seat back hinges attached
A couple of sticky points showed up when looking at the rear seat rudder installation and fuel valve bracket 

The rear seat rudder pedal guide bracket(s) (F-8117) uses the same nutplate as the F-881 mid cabin cover and an additional nutplate (the type with both rivets on one side of the screw hole MS21051).  The instructions make no mention of leaving room for the other nutplate so I ended up combining both nutplates with a common rivet and a shim under the added nutplate.

Also, the fuel selector valve bracket (F-883A) was not long enough as shown in the drawing. I moved it forward so it would fit and had to relocate some nutplates.  Hopefully this will not cause problems later.

I am starting to learn not to trust the measurements in the drawings but to rather fit and trust reality, the airplane in front of my face!

Nutplate positions for Rear Seat Rudder Pedals, Seat Ramps and Cabin Cover.  The second rivet from the bottom of the picture is a common rivet to two nutplates.
I used AN426AD3-3 "keeper" rivets between the real rivet holes to hold down the forward baggage door support strips.  Also I should have been more careful the overhang of the skin was the same in the at its aft end as well as the forward end. 

The WD-814 roll bar does take some tweaking to fit well.  It seemed to work better to clamp down only one side drill that side then clamp and drill the other. 

The panel sure got full quickly with the planned instruments.

Forward fuselage top skin and planned instrument panel.
The ground adjustable rudder tracks have also been pop riveted in place.  Quick builders should call and request the latest revision regarding these.

The only part of building the baggage door that was not well explained was how to hold the F-873D inner skin in position for drilling.  I drilled and installed a couple of temporary pop rivets on the bottom edge before putting the door on for drilling.  Perhaps this is what goofed up the fit later

I followed the directions exactly and it fit well until the door was removed to install the rivets on the top and bottom.  Then the fit was just "OK" and foul words flew.  There is room for improvement and tweaking will occur.  (When I figure out where to tweak)

Forward Fuselage Skin
 Riveting the forward skin was not too difficult.  CS4-4 pop rivets were used in the landing gear box area because the wiring makes getting a hand and bucking bar in the gear boxes impossible.  The choice was to either use solid rivets and do all the electrical installation with the skin in place or to wait and use few pop rivets.  The instrument panel was lowered about 3.5 inches and suspended with strings from the subpanel during riveting.   This allowed enough room to stick an arm through for bucking along the top of the skin.  I have not figured out how to install the hinge pin for the baggage door yet....