Kevin Faris showed up at the house this morning promptly at 9 am as promised.  Today, Kevin was finally able to break into his hangar and retrieve his metal shear and bring it down with him. Kevin said I could borrow it while I am working on the RV.  The thing is an antique, but it works like a million bucks...  (NOTE: Kevin, I started to clean off the shear as you can see the partial dirt left on the foot pedal(?).  I will clean the rest of it later....)

We started the day by locating all the seat pans and baggage compartment top skins.  Clecoed them all together and it started to look like an actual structure.

While I was match drilling all the skins, Kevin worked on fluting the F-715L (R) (Outboard Seat Ribs).  One of the gripes Kevin had with these ribs on his plane was that he was never quite able to get the outboard seat ribs to lay flat up against the F-704 center section.  From the pict below, you can sort of see that is because the rib is actually long enough that it is being prevented from laying flat by the inside radius of the F-704.

In came the metal shear. We trimmed approx 1/16" off the forward edge of the seat rib and re-installed.  You can see now that the rib now lays flat on the F-705 center section.  I thought that I had a better pict of this, but I don't.  When we drilled the match holes with the F-704 and clecoed the two pieces together it laid perfectly flat AND YES, there is still plenty of edge distance on the rib (in excess of 2 hole diameters).  If I would have taken the center section apart again, I would have more pictures to show.....

Kevin called it an early day to get home, so I was left with what to do next.  I fiddled around with my ELT mounting location, but couldn't (am still now sure) if I am going to put it in the baggage compartment bay I had previously reserved for it (More pictures to come).

Once I decided, no decisions could be made on the ELT, I moved on to making a mounting bracket for the strobe power supply.  I had some surplus 0.025" 2024 aluminum sheet leftover from the wing walk doubler in order to make the bracket.

Here is the basic steps I took to fabricate the strobe power supply mount.  You can't really tell from this picture, but the mount in this picture is actually a trapezoid shape.  Anyway, my basic steps were:

• Decided how long the mount was going to be forward to aft.
• Measured the forward and aft points of the baggage compartment bay widths where the mounting bracket would go.
• Added 20/32" for each flange that will secure the mounting bracket to the baggage ribs.
• The opposite flanges used to stiffen the bracket I added 10/32" for each flange to the overall bracket length.
• Before cutting the corners out to allow for bending of the flanges, I drilled a #12 hole in each corner which would serve as a 'relief' between the bends in the two flanges.

Fast forward to cutting out the flange relief's and making the bends....  You see that the bracket is not much larger than the actual power supply.  That is one reason I think I will be able to stick with the 0.025" thick bracket.  The actual power supply mounted to the bracket will add to the mounting brackets rigidity.  0.025" thick 2024 T-3 aluminum sheet is what Van's uses on their ELT / Strobe Brackets they sell.

Here is just the other side of the bracket.  It will pretty much fill that particular bay of the baggage compartment.

In order to lighten the bracket further, I decided I would cut a lightening hole in the center of the bracket.  I basically just marked "X" using the holes I transferred from the strobe power supply to the bracket to identify the center.

Post lightening hole cut....

The bracket fits in the luggage bay nice and tight.  I will add some holes on the flange (3 / side) to secure it to the baggage compartment ribs.

Here are the two different flanges I bent in the bracket in case you found my description confusing.

This bracket is very light and amazingly rigid.  I am going to make the ELT bracket out of a little heavier aluminum sheet since the ELT is slightly heavier and isn't as large (it won't stiffen the mounting plate like the strobe power supply will).