This morning, I went over to Craig Schneider's hanger. Our local EAA chapter's builder's subgroup had a meeting to check out his progress. It's amazing how quickly he's putting his Rans S-19 together. In only four months of time, he's got the tail together and most of the fuselage too. Here's the horizontal stabilator.

The tailcone looks great!

So does the center section of the fuselage.

I went over to the next hangar to check out Don Austin's GP4 and noticed these nifty crimp clamps that he used to hold on his firesleeve. I may use something similar.

Upon returning home, I was pleased to see that my replacement parts had arrived from Van's. I talked to Tom at Van's on Monday about the problem with the edge distance. Although I explained that the misplaced hole in the firewall stiffener was really Van's responsibility since I followed the plans, it was clear he wasn't going to spring for new parts. He gave me a solution that would have been structurally sound, but it wasn't the solution I was looking for, so I just ordered two new F-684 gussets and one new F-601B-L-1 firewall stiffener.

Here's the new (modified) layout for the gusset. If your kit is like mine, these dimensions will work much better. You'll see how well this fits in the next couple images.

I used some AN470AD4 rivets to ensure the F-713 auxiliary longeron was aligned with the firewall weldment and clamped the gusset into position for transfer drilling.

Here's the left gusset after all the drilling is done. Notice that the upper left hole has plenty of edge distance all around. Likewise with the hole in the firewall stiffener that's near the top of this image (close to the bottom of the fuselage).

Next I decided to work on the F-713 on the right side of the fuselage. At this point, I've trimmed the forward end to 10.5 degrees, marked the aft end at the flange of the F-704 bulkhead and trimmed it also at 10.5 degrees. There's a centerline marked on the backside and I've got a clamp and magnets holding it in position ready for drilling.

As expected, getting the right gusset trimmed and drilled went much faster than the left one.