Brief Description: Bending the fuselage main longerons and drilling a
No pictures of bending the longerons; just fitting the aft canopy deck. The manual is correct that bending the longerons requires more of an artist's touch. I fiddled for hours with the first longerons and at the end I over bent them so I had to unbend and be a bit gentler with the rubber mallet. The second longeron took about 15 minutes to form to the correct shape.....typical. At first I used a cardboard template as suggested but in the end, I used the left and right aft canopy deck parts as a template.
Once I was happy with the longerons, I clamped the aft L&R canopy decks to the L&R longerons respectively making sure to have use a shim on the outside of the deck to longeron to allow for the .032 side fuselage skins that will later be installed.
Part of an airplane (rudder and tail wheel) on left side of image 1 is my unfinished Starduster Too
RV7 longerons shape the fuselage outline
Left side aft canopy deck clamped ready for match drilling
