After you have finished the bottom skins, it's time to install the control stick. You will need to get some geese to help stick the washers and shims together so that you can get the bolts in just right without any play and without too much pressure. I ended up just using 1 light washer and 1 regular washer and no shim. But I think almost every builder ends up with a slightly different combination so trial and error is really the only way here. By the way, once you torque the bolts you will notice a slight amount of resistance (I mean super slight). I decided to torque to the bottom of the range (20 in-lbs) and the control column moved freely with 0 play.
After you get those installed it's time to work on the longerons. Get ready for some major match drilling, deburring, and countersinking. All fairly easy stuff but time consuming. I ended up making a jig for all the counter sinking in the longerons. Super helpful. Thank you Steve out in the UK for the tip 👍.
Oh and you will also need to get your deemed out to trim the longerons. It's not bad but hopefully you have a lot of cutting wheels as they will not make it through all the longerons you will need to cut (they are quite thick).
The side skins also get some very interesting love in this section. Not just your standard deburring and dimpling. You end up having to feather one corner and the radius the portion that will meet the canopy. You start to really get an idea of how this is all going to work.
If you are like me and ry and prime everything together you may find this section a bit tedious. If I had to do it over again I would prime after each step instead of skipping each time the plans call to rivet (like when you are supposed to rivet the engine mounts to the longerons). Dealing with clecos throughout all of this is kind of a pain.
A big time soaker is the piano hinge. I decided to stick with the piano hinge for the firewall attachment that will be used to connect the cowl. This was not a crazy hard task but it definitely slowed me down due to the fact that nothing I had was riveted so I had to cleco everything together to make sure I had it right. As normal, the plans call for a length of 20 1/8” which will give you the EXACT edge distance you need. Not that there is a slight curve and this will affect the line up, so I recommend starting with the top hole and not the pilot hole. Otherwise you may have to make a new piece (like I did) unless you happens to be perfect and account for deburring in your measurements. Or, make yours 20 1/4” instead of 20 1/8” so that you will have a little room for error. You will end up countersinking these holes too, so that means you need 2.5 x's the diameter of the rivet.
After that there's going to be a lot of pieces that get separated and dumped and deburred. Make sure you label everything as they look very similar to each other after they are separated and cleaned up.