While I wait for the centre fuselage parts to dry I decided to skip ahead a little today and get the longerons down. To fit them to the fuselage first they need to be notched to fit around the vertical bars at the back of the fuselage.
Given the amount of work that’s already gone into the longerons this is one scary task so I decided to really slow down and take my time. Preperation started last night by reading the manual, studying the drawings and research others’ builder logs.
This morning I felt confident enough to give it a go.
Having read the other build logs I knew that the longerons may not fit in the bulkhead cut outs so first task of the day was to check with a scrap piece of angle. As expected it didn’t fit so I filed the notches a little to make room.

After all 6 notches were done I set up the longerons on the benches and clamped the aft deck in place as per the drawings and triple checked the measurements and orientation.

Once I was satisfied that it was correct I marked the notch.

Then I removed the deck and drilled two 3/32 holes and cut the notch with a hacksaw.

After several iterations of trial and error I finally had a nice fit around the vertical bar. I double checked it was correct by fitting it to the fuselage and popped on the aft deck too.

I’m pleased with that! So I fitted both longerons and flipped the fuselage over ready for the centre fuselage when that’s done.

Next was a little bit of workshop re-organising. While searching for the aft deck earlier I realised that the huge fuselage crate was taking up a lot of room in the workshop unnecessarily so I relocated the few parts that were left in there and removed it from the workshop. I also took some time to finish packing away some of the hardware. After an hour or so of sorting out nuts and bolts I still had a bench load of stuff left to pack away!

That’s for another day though.