Drilled the pilot side of the longeron. The inverted working is sometimes giving me headaches. The plans are drawn in normal orientation while the fuselage is now positioned upside down. This is sometimes confusing and it's only to get worse from here looking at the rest of the work on the front fuselage.

Anyway, continued drilling the pilot side (left side) of the longeron to the side skins.

When the longerons were drilled. I had some other tasks that had to be done.

First of all, I found out that I had been to optimistic in settings rivets on the aft fuselage. the rivet at the intersecion of J-channel and second line after the bulkhead had to be removed again. No big deal. Removed them without problems but it's never a good feeling having to drill out rivets in the first place.

 skinContinued on the next chapter in the manual. Clamp the longeron to the front side of the F770 skin. Used many clamps to ensure good alignment of top longeron web and side skin.

drilled all #40 holes until front and #30 for last #30 size holes where steel bracket of the firewall brackets will be mounted.

as an intermediate step, I made the small reinforcement F704L. It's a bit confusing how to start here.

The plans say F904L. This part is actually deviated from the RV9 plans. F904L actually is the same as F704L as the size s are the same for RV7 and RV9.

next challenge is actually finding the correct hardware to start working from. The parts are in a hardware bag so it's actually quite easy but not mentioned in the plans.

The bag has 4 bars of the correct gauge and width but about A inch to long.

After cutting them back, and edge smoothening. I labeled them. Ready to be matchdrilled

The longerons are still attracting my attention. Instead of continuing on the F704s, I decided to measure the longerons.

The manual says that the longeron needs to be at least 3/4 inch short of the edge of the F770 skin. Mine were too long on both sides so took the caliper and measured a rough 3/4 inch initial measurement to cut back using the cutting disc and die grinder.

This was a first rough cut. I 'll get back to this in more detail in a next session.