Drilling, cutting and laying out fuselage skins

It seems all I have been doing for the past week is drilling skins. I have gotten the tail skins all drilled, cut and clecoed back onto the tail cone. I can already see that there is going to be a lot of shimming to make it look good.

Yesterday and today I have started on the bottom skins. I had a good hunk of .032 left over from the 4X12 sheet. I am going to make the bottom skins out of .032 for a little better finish and some strength. I had to do quite a bit of measuring to make sure I would have enough. I needed 50.25" long and 48" wide. I had to measure the wing to make sure that my overhang on the bottom skin would cover the inner rib on the wing that has all the nut plates in it. This makes the bottom fairing for the wing to fuse intersection. Just had enough by about 1/4". Whew!!! .032 is not cheap these days.....

I marked out my skins and cut them to their overall size. Now I am in the process of cutting each skin to fit the fuselage contours and overlaps with the tail skins. Each skin from the front to the back, overlaps the other and you need to make sure there is enough to get the second row of rivets in the edge of the overlapping skin.

I also marked out all my center lines and I have to start the layout for the rivets. Then it's more drilling. After that I can finally back drill the bottom skins and then move onto the front bottom skin. It's a bent piece of .040 that have some angle riveted the bottom to stiffen it all up. These connect to the spar and front firewall mounts. Lots of small pieces that need to be fabbed up. I'm hoping that in a couple of weeks I can have all the skins at least drilled. Then its off to the debur, dimple and prime races.......