Fuselage stand

With the work on the bottom fuselage coming to an end, we wanted to free up the work benches and build a lower stand for the fuselage so we could work on it from above. We roughly followed the one build by TASRV10 to build one. This involved a 57" x 48" frame plus 2' legs:

Stand frame, legs and wheels in position

We used a very advanced technique to load test it (jumping up and down on its most fragile point):

Wife load testing the stand

The idea is that the center section bulkhead tips rest on the (48") sides of the frame, and the aft portion of the bottom skin would rest on the 57" part, for which we added some carpet padding:

Adding carpet padding to one end of the stand

That also added to its leisure function:

Wife on stand

Turned out (we hadn't notice before) that at this point of the build, the fuselage is so perfectly balanced on the center section bulkhead, that neither its front nor aft bottom parts though the frame :) but this will likely change when we attach the tailcone.

We then finally transferred the fuselage onto it:

Fuselage on stand

With this we can go back to beating parts into submission.

Time lapse:

Total workshop time: 45.5h (3.1h for this task)