Dimpling and beginning of an aft fuselage riveting^4h

Today I started a final assembly of the aft fuselage.

The first step was to dimple all the parts. This took most of the time of a work session. I used a combination of a pneumatic squeezer and the DRDT-2 dimpler.

Then I assembled the skeleton with the bottom skin, two bulkheads, and the J-stiffeners, and riveted bulkheads to the bottom skin.

Then I riveted the ELT brackets to the bottom J-stiffener. Per plans, these brackets are installed with the LP4-3 blind rivets. However, access to the bottom rivets is not very good and since the bottom of the ELT bracket does not interfere with the rivets for the J-stiffeners, I used regular solid AN470AD4 rivets to attach the bottom of both brackets. The top part will still use LP4-3 blind rivets as it closes the access to the middle J-stiffener rivets.

The plan is to bend the bracket away from the skin, rivet the middle J-stiffener to the skin, then attach the bracket to the middle J-stiffener with the LP4-3 rivets.

Finally, I installed the nutplates for the rudder cable fairings and the aft access covers.