Upper forward fuselage started

I haven't posted in quite a while because my NAS (where I keep all my building videos and my Final Cut library) stopped working, and it took me a while to get a new one and set it up:

New NAS, where I keep (among other things) all the videos I post here!

With that resolved, I'll be making a batch of posts with everything we did in the last couple of months.

I jumped ahead to section 31 so that I could match-drill the top skins to the upper fuselage side channels and machine-countersink those before priming or riveting the side skins, to avoid interference.

This section starts with cutting and fabricating a few different angles/spacers:

Fabricated angles and spacer for the subpanel

We then had to bent the lower part of the panel:

Bending the bottom flange of the subpanel center section

We put it all together and final-drilled all the holes:

Final-drilled subpanel

Subpanel clecoed in place

Subpanel and top skin clecoed in place

The hand hold doublers require some forming to lay flat against the top skin:

Forming the hand-hold doublers onto the curved top skin

For the panel support angle, I used a center line on the spacer to keep it centered, then match-drilled the holes:

Aligned centerline on the panel support angle spacer, ready to match-drill

Match-drilled panel support angle

These steps were more than sufficient to be able to machine-countersink the upper fuselage channels, so I stopped at that - I'll probably get back to it much later when I work on the panel.

Time lapse:

Total upper forward fuselage time: 11.3h