Riveting the last skin!

The upper forward tailcone skin is left open for a while, because it provides good access to the stuff installed in the tailcone: an elevator bellcrank, pitch servo, ELT, ELT antenna, GPS antenna, strobe ballast, master relay, and battery box.  With all these things done and wired, we wanted to attach the skin so we could work on the transition to the cabin top, so it was time to rivet again.

Here it is partially done.

Here I am sitting in the tailcone.  I had to do a lot of leaning to get at all the rivets.  I won’t miss doing this.

Here’s Kelly doing the last row of rivets.  These are pulled rivets that go through the skin and fiberglass cabin top, so she was able to do these herself.