Today I drilled out the outboard most nutplate on the forward half of the spar...

...which allowed me to remove the left gear weldment. Now I'm ready to fit the left floor panel including installation of nutplates on the lower left longeron.

I recently received my Robin Snips from US Tool. Tom Thompson put me on to these snips and I tried his out when I visited his shop a while ago. They did a much nicer job of shearing aluminum without requiring a lot of cleanup filing.

Here's the piece I sheared off. It retained a bit of a curl...

...but that was easy to get out. The edges only needed about 0.015 inch of filing to get right down to the line. This strip should be ready to fit to the forward fuselage once I get back to that part of the job. BTW, don't look for this in the plans. This is a custom mod. Hopefully it works out well...we'll see.