This morning Kerin and I went to DLZ for the local vintage chapter 27 pancake breakfast. The weather was overcast, but the rain held off until pancake time was over. This nicely polished (Swift?) made a bee-line for the runway once the first drops started falling.

Snickers enjoyed the airport surroundings.

Once I got home, I located the original F-707B angle bracket I had cut quite some time ago and clamped it in place. This time I located it correctly with the flange on the right side of the stiffening rib.

A bit of work with the drill had 'er all set.

Next was to work on fitting the side rails as well as the gusset thingies that are forward of the side rails. I covered the longeron-skin gap with tape to avoid getting shavings trapped in there when I drilled and countersunk the longeron.

Huh...wonder why I took this shot. I suppose that's what I get for being late with my updates.

Anyway, you can see that there are two rivet holes to attach the side rail with the gusset. However, the tab on the side rail isn't pre-bent at the correct angle, so I marked the bend line with a sharpie...

...and bent the tab inboard until the angle matched the angle of the gusset. It really goes on the inside of the gusset...I'm only holding the tab on the outside here to check the angle of my bend.

When I set out to do the exact same thing on the right side of the fuselage, I couldn't get the ends to butt up tight. There was about a .030 gap. WTF?!

Looking underneath showed that the end of this flange was interfering with one of the vertical members of the F-704 bulkhead. I trimmed it back some to clear, then realized I needed to clear the cover plate as well. All in all I trimmed about 3/32.

I made a similar trim on the left side to clear the cover, but only needed to trim about 1/16".

After drilling all the holes, I countersunk them right through the masking tape. Of course I was careful to adjust the depth of the countersink to compensate for the thickness of the tape. I decided to leave the tape in place so I could use my friend Brent's idea of priming the countersinks only.

It worked great. No mess...just primer in the countersinks.