We made some serious progress on the fuselage this weekend!

On Friday, Ellen and I finished backriveting all the smaller rivets on the forward skins.  After crawling out from under the fuse, I found some graffiti.

I mangled a couple of rivets because we were rushing, hence some related graffiti…

And those of you who speak German will recognize the wordplay on this bad rivet…

And on Saturday, my friend and fellow RV builder Captain John came over and we drove all the AD4 rivets (big rivets, for you who aren’t airplane geeks) left in the forward fuse.  A few hours of work yielded a lot of progress.  Here’s the pilot’s side…

John and I also shot the remaining baggage area rivets where I had previously experimented with Hysol to fill some gaps between skin layers.  These bends came out a lot better than expected, certainly worth the mess and time it took to apply the liquid shim…

Captain John did a hell of a job bucking the AD4 rivets.  They’re pretty damn close to perfect.

Another picture?  Sure, why not?

I had to remove the AN3 bolts blocking some rivets in the firewall corner gusset; that’s the center right area in the picture above.  Getting those reinstalled and torqued was a little bit of a challenge, but I managed to frankenstein together a torque wrench extension that worked pretty well.

We’re on to the final stretch…just a few more rivets on the belly and longerons, and it’s canoe-flipping time!