Brief Description: Top side skins boot cowl and top
Bent all tabs on firewall and instrument panel mount to be parallel, filed last tab on panel down to taper properly to side skins.
Top side skins require a lot of radius and are hard to force down into positon. Decided to bend a preliminary radius into the sheets. Marked where the bend ends when it meets the side skin and put the skins into the "bender" seen in photo 1. It is easy to bend the skins into something like photo 2, but it is also easy to crease them if done improperly. The bend is done by rotating the angles while wrapping the sheet up and over the table. You push and pull them up and down on the angles and also by bending in the radius by manipulating the sheet from the outside. Too much force can creat a crease which can be taken out by careful pounding with a big mallet.
When done the sheets lay almost in final position without any force. Slightly underbending is better, but oberbending as can be seen on the left skin is easily removed when holding them down for drilling.
Started drilling on the top center skin to the firewall and ran out of time.
