I thought since I was being held hostage in my office by clerical duties, I'd go ahead and give y'all a short update. Yesterday, while trying to press on with the tail skid assembly, I found the old piece of aluminum doubler that the skid eventually bolts to on the bottom of the fuselage. It was in pretty rough shape and I decided to fabricate a new one real quick. The first thing to do was to cut out a piece of aluminum sheet and start duplicating holes from the old piece........
I then just traced the shape of the old piece onto the new one, cut it out, and trimmed it to the correct size & shape.......
The next thing I needed to do was to give the new piece the radius needed to match the bottom of the fuselage. I reckon I could've walked aalllll the way over to the other side of the hangar and fought with our rolling machine, but instead, I chose to find something nearby that had about the right radius I was looking for and just leaned on it a bit......
The next step was to put the old skid base plate on the doubler and trace the outer edges. I won't be using that same base plate any longer, but I need the new one to attach to the same location........
I then countersunk the holes that will need flush rivets in order for the base plate to sit down correctly. That pretty much covers it for this piece for now. My next step will be to build a new base plate for the tail skid....
Now how did these two pictures sneak in here?
Oh, and we also received our bomb doors and four bomb racks yesterday!

There's no way that I'll be able to put the bomb doors on this year, but at least we have 'em. I'm gonna try hard to get the racks installed, but frankly, it's going to be a longshot with the impending deadline. I'm sure I'll keep you posted on it though.......
Well, I'm going to try to sneak out of here and actually get some work done on the airplane. Andy is currently making some stencils for a little touch of detail with the new paint job, and there is obviously much more to do regarding that. But I thought y'all would like a peek anyway.
By the way...don't even think about asking about the noseart. That's definitely going to stay hush-hush until the unveiling.
Gary