A long day in the workshop today, with some good things and some no so good. First I rivet the canopy jettison mechanism. Nothing difficult but a lot of clecoing and unclecoing.



Then I rivet the siderails to the forward frame. A few rivets had to be redone, but nothing to bother.



Here is how it looks with the frame partially open.



Installing the canopy skin, showed some problems. Among them, the skin is catching the forward fuselage skin when the canopy is opened. This is a known problem so I fabricated a shim, but despite being quite thick it seems no to be enough. Before working further on this problem, I'll check on the internet.



So I decided to work on other parts, I riveted the rudder and elevator stops.



I also finished the gas struts support by drilling the central hole to size and tapping it



And last, I finished the side latch by cutting, drilling and tapping the connecting rod.

First I finish drilling the splice plate between the front frame and the siderails.



Then all the parts are disassembled, deburred and sanded before priming. It could be that this was the last big priming session (for aluminium parts at least).

After the session today, it seems nothing has changed from yesterday. A lot of the work today was assembling and disassembling the parts and tweaking all the little problems. First the rear frame and siderails had to be adjusted.



On the picture, the junction between the siderail and the forward frame that needed some tweaking.



After all was done, I installed the splice plate between the siderail and the forward frame. The holes on the forward frame will be enlarged a little later, this will allow for some small adjustments if needed.



The forward frame making an angle with the siderail, a small wedge has to be installed. On the picture it is not yet at it's correct position, I'll do it later.

Only one hour in the workshop today, I tried to install the rear frame and the siderails. On the picture, the spacer blocks that will allow the frame to be the correct distance from the rollbar.



On the left, the rollbar and on the right the frame. The gap is a bit too wide here (we want 1/4") but is mostly correct elsewhere, some fine tuning to do.



Here, the whole frame with the siderails. Those still require some adjustments before the drilling begins.

The first task today is to refabricate one of the rods of the canopy jettison mechanism. Then I reinstall the canopy frame to deal with some interferences. The forward seal support has to be filed a bit.



The fram clears the support. (The blue line is only for reference).



Then I cleco the skin and the braces. Pull everything into position and drill the braces to the skin from inside the fuselage. After drilling, the usual deburring and dimpling takes place.



Six clasps are then installed to have the braces secured.



To finish today's session, I plot the hole pattern on the rear frame splice plate. There is a tooling hole on each half frame that comes in the way of the pattern given on the plans. The big dot is the hole's position and the plan have you drill at the intersection just right, which doesn't leave enough edge distance. So I will drill two holes where the small triangles are and use one more rivet than indicated. There is no problem for the other holes.