I have been lax at keeping up with my blog entries but I haven't been idle. I have been dealing with a number of issues created by the factory and by me.

I backtracked a lot of rivet work when I discovered the factory installed L angle on the spar at the gear box stations blocked me from back riveting the flanges of the channels to the spar. This also required ordering AN3 bolts to replace the solid rivets I removed.

I was missing the two lower plates that are installed in the lower bearing supports and had to order those.

I created an issue with the gear slides when I didn't notice that the one inch side needed to be narrowed to 3/4 inch to allow the lower bearing support to slide into place.

The lower bearing supports were 2mm to narrow pinching the gear slides which in turn interfered with the gear leg pins.

As noted in the discussion it took awhile to bend the extrusions to fit the curvature of the nose ribs/skin.

The steel plates that mount on top of the center wing and guide the gear legs were cut to the drawing width, and not the corrected width (130mm to 138mm). That made for some interesting tolerance problems to work out.

Other then that, things are going very well and I have the bottom skin and the nose skin pilot drilled with all the misc L angles fabricated. Almost ready to flip the whole thing over to work on the top side again.