Chapter 5 – Fuselage Sides

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Some pix of the fuselage side construction.

Longerons curing on the jigs.

A close-up of the curing longerons. Notched and all.

	Cutting the side spacers. I cut the whole side as one piece (but had to extend ends about 8”). This seemed logical to me – but this was before I bought a band-saw. Later on, I cut spacers for the floor in segements, which was much more manageable.
I clamped some straight edges 45* offset, and shaved the spacer down to create a good bevel angle. Again, the band-saw ended up being easier, I just hadn’t committed the $ at this point to buy one.

I thought I took some pictures of the fuselages sides in the “cradle”, but don’t have them now! The one thing I struggled with was using too much 5-min epoxy to hold the foam sides to the masonite. One problem was it caused lots of craters in the sides that had to be filled, but the 5-min also started setting before I had the side fully positioned and weighted down. As a result, the side floated about 1/8” above one end of the masonite. I used lots of clamping to hold the longerons in place and get good alignment between both sides, but it did create extra work.

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