CHAPTER 49 - Rear Turtledeck

By this time, there's no big mystery to drilling on a skin. The first photo shows the attached skin with the marks for trimming. Pull it off, trim, prime the enterior, and cleco back on. Now just insert your bucker and you're ready to rivet.

Insert your bucker?!! Yep, I'm too big to fit in there, so I got Judi to do it. Usually I prefer to have her do the riveting, but necessity is a mother. She was Ok with the task, as you can tell by the nonchalant position of her feet in the second photo. I made sure she had plenty of padding (notice the old blankets in the third photo), hearing protection (working inside a drum), and goggles (stray chips fly no matter how diligently you vacuumn). The end result is a nicely riveted skin as in the fourth photo. We left the forward bulkhead unriveted; this is where the forward skin will overlap.

Now that this skin was on, I could mount the seat belt cable and run it through the baggage compartment bulkhead. The next two shots show the details; these were taken after the baggage floors were in and everything primed.