Chapter 7 Fuselage Exterior

This is where your box becomes a canoe.. or as one astute person speculated "why are two girls building a 1932 Ford roadster?"

We thought we had a great idea and made these sanding blocks for the sides, they will get you in the ballpark but you still need to fuss the corners down to the template size.

Making the NACA scoop was fun.. finally something that looks like an airplane part!

We were nervous about the screw threads hanging out where they would either inevitably get bent or damaged or where they would bend or damage one of us, so we fashioned these protective wood blocks to keep everything out of harm's way.
If you look carefully at the second picture you will see our secret to getting holes through bulkheads to line up so perfectly. Figure out wher you want the center of each end to go and drill a small hole, then guesstimate where the intermediate holes go to the best of your abilities and drill a medium hole in each bulkhead, thread a string through all the holes and see which way you need to correct the intermediate holes with a dremel. Once the string goes all the way through without touching the sides of the intermediate holes you can put the paper pattern of the actual clearance holes on the string and mark the actual holes. For the sloped holes we just happened to have a complete set of ellipse templates in 5 degree increments left over from the old days before CAD systems.

Under the heading of "Great things we have done then undone " comes our landing/taxi light. We had a nifty one all worked out then decided to move the whole thing elsewhere. Glad this is composite instead of metal.