Brief Description: Tom Clark fastback - top skin (1)
To fit the top skin we placed the skin over the bulkheads, with the marked center line on the inside running down the center line of the fuselage. The skin was pulled tight with tiedowns over the middle two bulkheads. Once correctly positioned we back drilled the forward most longeron hole on the right side. We then marked the horizontal center line of the aftmost rivet hole and removed the skin from the fuselage.
We now had the forward longeron hole and a line indicating the vertical position of the aft hole. We didn't drill the aft hole on the fuselage as the skin was not lying flat and it would certainly be in the wrong place. We drew a line from the forward hole to the line that we marked at the aft end. We then clamped the Vans top skin to the Tom Clark skin and used it as a drill guide, with our drawn line showing through the pre-punched holes. We cleco'd every hole as we went. Once drilled and cleco'd we drew a line along the edge of the Vans skin to indicate where we shall need to trim the skin.
