I made all the angles and ribs for the fuselage box. It’s a matter of assembling them all now. Not so easy. All the plans are in 2 dimensions, while the real plane is in three dimensions, obviously. The plans try to make up for this by showing multiple vantage point such as showing the same assembly from top, side and bottom. Sometimes that’s just not enough to give all the required details.

So I called up my Onex builder buddy, Dennis Marick. He game lots of good tips and offered for me to come visit his build. That was great. Just what I needed. I took a ton of pictures and figured out exactly how the parts are supposed to fit together. It was also great to just shoot the sh** and compare build notes. I noticed several things nice about his build… like somehow he got all the turtledeck formers to fit pretty flush with the skin, no fluting or major bending. Turns out he had a pro builder help him out… maybe I should do that more often.

Another struggle was that multiple parts of that plans converge at this point. The page I’m on is “Fuselage Box Assembly”, but that intersects with the firewall, canopy, glare shield, and most pressing: the landing gear. The bottom cross beams are called out in the landing gear assembly, and there are variants in the plans for tail dragger and tricycle configurations. It’s unclear which parts I should be working on now, because it sure seems like it’ll be much harder to add more parts here later when everything is riveted and closed up. And flipping back and forth between three different plan pages is tiresome. I think I’ve got it figured out now though.

In the evening I drilled pilot holes for the firewall and got that clecoed on. Still much to do here.

Skelton Firewall