Final tail to fuselage mating

I spent the last couple of days cleaning the shop and getting parts organized (something that piled up on me). Today I felt it was time to get things on the plane itself moving. Over the last couple of nights I got all of the priming, deburring, and dimpling on both the tail and mid-fuse skins and bulkheads done. Everything was set to bring the tail and fuselage back together for riveting!

The last photo before the two parts permanently become one (hopefully for a long time!)

 

Christie was at the movies with Mackenzie and I could not wait to get things moving so I fumbled around for 45 minutes and finally got the two assemblies lined up.

I clecoed everything up and triple checked the skin alignments. I noticed when I was taking the tail off of the fuselage on initial fit-up that one of the mid-fuse bottom skins got under the tail skin and it should be the other way around. So make sure to double check all the corners of the skin fit ups.

I set the side skin rivets and then skipped forward a couple of steps to rivet some of the ribs. I am going to need someone inside of the plane laying on the ribs in order to help buck, so I felt it was better to stiffen up some of the ribs before putting weight on them.

Just another day of riveting.