Today, I begun working on the firewall. There is a total of 27 parts to be installed (and I did not install the fuel pump doubler). There are only a few parts to fabricate, among them to angles cut from some angle stock. Here are the raw angles:



After almost one hour of cutting and grinding, here they are finished.



The angles need to be 3/32" from the bottom of the firewall, I used my reamer to mesure this and then backdrilled all the holes.



Here is the firewall with everything installed, all the holes have been back drilled.

The fuselage is of "monocoque" or "stressed skin" design, meaning the rigidity is obtained by assembling the skins onto bulkheads and stringers. The first task is to fabricate all the bulkheads, from the firewall in the front to the last one in the tail. I needed a good part of the afternoon to locate all the bits and pices scattered around the workshop. On the first picture all the bulkheads, except the firewall which is on the second one.

Today, I had a look at the wingtips, but decided against installing them now. I'll do it this spring or summer, as I still have to prime some parts of the tank, install the lights and after the inspection, rivet the lower wings and the flaps.
I then took a closer look at some fuselage parts and rearranged the storage.

First I began repairing my problem from yesterday. The riveting went quite well.



The I torqued all the bolts and nuts. The I clecoed the lower skins, they will get riveted after the next inspection. As I wanted to screw on the inspection holes cover plates, I noticed I had not yet riveted the nuplates. So 48 nutplates and 96 rivets later the cover holes are installed.

This afternoon, I first begun by drilling out some rivets on the outboard right wing aileron braket. The bracket was not sitting flush on the rear spar. But as the rib was under tension, the holes got elongated by quite a bit. The solution, already approved by Vans (what a technical support), is to rivet a doubler plate before reriveting everything



Then I used Mickey Coggins', a swiss RV-8 builder, method to build the aileron stop. Normally the stops are made from some aluminium angle and riveted onto the inboard aileron bracket. Mickey's solution is simple and elegant. One of the spacer is inserted in a Delrin rod and when installed will hit the bracket at the end of the aileron's up travel. There is no down travel stop, this role is taken by the opposite aileron up travel stop. The picture of one of the stops :



Here a view of the stop installed, in the background you can make out the bracket the stop will hit at the end of it's travel.



The I primed all the small parts for the roll servo, I installed everything into the right wing. I just have to check the washers needed before torqueing everything.