Surprisingly, the prep time for riveting takes longer than the riveting itself. My friend Graham and I shot most of the rivets on the aft fuselage in a couple of hours and then Jodaye helped finish up the remaining rivets in about 30 minutes.
Here's the aft fuselage with all of the lower riveting finished. The top skins don't get added until after the center fuselage is attached to the front of this piece.
The center fuselage makes up the cockpit and the baggage compartment. The gold beams on the left are the center section where the wings will attach. The silver bulkhead in back is where the seat backs will rest. Behind that is the baggage compartment. Depending on how you load the plane, the baggage compartment can hold about 100 lbs of bags.
Here's the center fuselage with the upper skins in place. If it looks a bit small, the outside ribs still need to be added. Those don't go in until after the bottom skin is riveted on.
This has nothing to do with the plane, but here's one of the cool lenticular clouds we had last Saturday. You can see the top lenticular with two rotor clouds underneath. Boulder gets a lot of these clouds when the wind is strong out of the west in the winter. The air bounces off the Continental Divide and forms waves downwind. One of the updrafts is usually over Boulder. These are great for soaring. One pilot from Mile High Gliding (www.milehighgliding.com) went to 28,000 last Monday.
More wave clouds.
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