Going to anneal this piece of .063 thick 2024-T3 (after taking the plastic off, of course). Why?

Because I'm going to fabricate the doublers for the forward ribs from this material and I want the doublers to nest nicely with the ribs, so the bend radius needs to be quite small. However, in the -T3 condition, the bend radius needs to be 3x the thickness, or 3/16". Way too big. In the -O condition, I can bend with 1x the thickness or 1/16".

While that was annealing, I decided how to go about fitting the strip(s) which will bridge the gap between the forward skin and the canopy skin. It's going to require removing a bit of the top flange of these ribs to let the strip(s) pass across the width of the fuselage as a continuous piece.

...thusly.

In order to fit those strips, I need to have the top flanges in place. These top flanges, in turn need to be spaced down sufficiently to provide space to mount the strips. I temporarily positioned the center left top flange, using two pieces of .025 material to space it down from the underside of the canopy skin.

With the magnets holidng it in place, I moved the canopy frame and skin out of the way and traced the top edge of the sub panel. Now I just need to provide a 1/2 overlap of the flange and the sub panel (i.e. 1/4 edge distance on each part).

After sanding down the excess height of the flange, I center punched and drilled the flange #40, then transferred these holes to the sub panel.

Started the same process on the right, before knocking off for the evening.