The fuselage seems to be coming along fairly well. Progress seems fast compared to other other structures like the front seat, however I think it's subjective as the sides of the fuselage are physically big so they give the illusion of faster progress. In reality there seems to be about as much fit-up time per joint no matter what the size, or shape of the tube. At present the end of each tube takes about 20 to 30 minutes to form on the grinder, which is less than half the time it took for about the first dozen fit-ups. However, I think that is about as fast as I will get.
It has taken me longer to get to this stage of the project than I had hoped, but now things seem to be going quite well again. House fixing, and building dog fences ate up a substantial portion of my summer building time. Wintertime seems to be the best time for plane building.
The tables that I built for jigging up the fuselage halves went through several renditions before I decided that they would work. Each one is built from two sheets of ply-wood, and adjustable feet were built with carriage bolts and angle iron.
Well at this point everything is tacked in real good from the front of the cabin door back to the last set of clusters before the tailpost. Right now the jigs have been taken off the table, and I'm in the process of rolling the fuselage around while I finish the welds. I hope to get them all done before moving on, however there are some that may have to wait till the whole thing is on a rotisserie of sorts. There are just a bunch of really odd angles to weld, and approaching them on the table is difficult.
