Today officially starts the start of the tail cone.  Up to this point, I worked on bits and pieces for the tail cone section.  Mainly the fabrication of parts from raw materials.  Because of all those parts had already been fabricated prior today on downtime from the elevators, the tail cone got a big head start.  Started off by pulling out the SUV from the garage (hopefully temporarily until the elevator trailing edges are cured, riveted, off the workbench, and stored).

Vans sent me new 8' J channels a few days ago so today I cut them to the dimensions called out in the plans and deburred.  Next I cut the Cleaveland Tool tie down to size on the band saw and deburred it smooth.  Then I had to come up with a way to lay the bottom skin on to start the assembly process.  Didn't have any saw horses so used a narrow folding table spaced away enough to lay the bottom skin between it and the work bench.   Bulkheads clecoed.  The bottom 3 stiffeners were slid into place, match drilled and clecoed into place.  Next the right side 3 stiffeners were slid into place followed by the right skin.  The right skin was a royal pain in the rear to get the first cleco into each bulkhead.  Really sweated some nuts doing those in the garage.  Glad that was over with.  After the first cleco on each bulk heads were in, then the rest was easy to cleco.  Next was match drilling the right side stiffeners to the skin.  I'm about 95% done with match drilling the stiffeners to the side skin.  My central AC took a dump.  House had not cooled in several hours so I had to stop at about 8pm to investigate.  Turns out the a/c compressor fan capacitor is seems to be toast.  The fan spins only when I kick start the fan.  Back to the RV...I only had maybe 10 more holes to match drill!  errrrr. 

 Here is the time lapse video of today's progress.