Rollbar Continued

I didn't know how to describe the progress from today as it partly depends on how I am going to continue tomorrow evening. When I came home I started doing some supplementary jobs while waiting for my wife to come home to help me with the rollbar.
Among those jobs was a little counter sinking and nutplate riveting on the bracket that will hold the fuel tank in place as well as dimpling all the nutplate attach holes of the aft bulkhead that will close up the tailcone to the fuselage. Forgot to take a photo there but it's not that big of a task, is it.

I also started spraying the parts for the oil reservoir and the battery and the little platform for the GPS antenna with engine enamel.

Then when my wife came home, we immediately started working on sliding the aft half of the rollbar onto the bases again. That went pretty well as we had done it yesterday as a trial run. The next step was to now take the front half and get this one on as well. That was a bit more tricky - as expected, but we managed to finally get it on with a little tweaking and pushing.


Everything was clecoed into place and now the big question is how to continue?

I could rivet half of the holes inside and out and leave the rest clecoed before match-drilling, or I could rivet all of it and hope that I somehow will be able to get it off for deburring and then back on, or I could fill the rest of the holes with clecos as well, delay the riveting and match-drill now. The big advantage of the latter would be that if there was any trouble sliding it off or back on, I could take the clecos out and just do it like we did tonight. I'm afraid that the riveting will put so much tension on the bases that I might be able to get the rollbar off but maybe not so easily back on.
The structure just clecoed as it is in the photo above is very rigid, stiff and strong, so I'm not worried about the match-drilling being off if I just held it together with clecos.
So I lean towards that no-rivet option right now. Any comments from the educated crowd?

While I was thinking about the best way to do this I kept my hands busy by trial fitting those little struts that will go in front of the rollbar and connect it to the canopy deck. Looks like the fit is pretty good.


It was getting late, so I turned the previously sprayed parts over and sprayed the other side for the parts to completely dry over night. I peeked through "door" of the paint booth to take this sneak peak shot.


My favorite color red was out of stock ...

Addendum: Thinking about my thoughts from last night again I found a problem with them this morning. While it might be better to not rivet the structure before match-drilling for easier removal, it doesn't really help at all when painting it. My intention was to paint it before final installation and riveting it to the base blocks. Without rivets in them this is not going to be doable. I'll have to think more about this ...