Winter before Thanksgiving?

Mother Nature just can't figure things out this year. We had a very nice snow flurry day over the weekend that was quite pretty and pretty promptly melted. It did make for a neat Friday morning though. Saturday was just cold. This whole week has been in the lower 20's overnight, making the apartment quite chilly.

While it was snowing, I was working on math, nice quiet, relaxing progress time. Not quaternions this time, linear least squares on a nonlinear model with constraints and weighting. Lovely fun when it works, but so time consumingly frustrutating until then...

On Saturday, for a change I was in all day and was able to put several hours in on Goat progress (after working more math until noon).

I now have it to the point that I can sit on a fake seat made of couch cushions! With the monster padding, it's SUPER plush and comfortable. I can sit on the couch for hours and therefore can imagine sitting on these cushions in the Goat for hours!

I haven't figured out a plan for the seat yet, but I think I may try to find an old comfy couch on the side of the road and yoink the pillows for their foam. Maybe it will take getting some new foam from a re-upholstery store.

Taking off my removable seat, you can see what progress I've made. The seat was resting on some very temporary wooden cross pieces. The seat back was resting on the rear seat supports that are mostly in place.

I am short five inches of u-channel to make the rest of the brackets to finish off the nose section (hence stealing a couple from under the seat area; you can see a couple truss members dangling). This u-channel will get ordered whenever I decide to do another order. I also am short several bolts because the grip lengths specified in the drawings aren't always exactly right. Several times I have dipped into the AN-14A stash because 16's were just too long, or vice versa. If I'm not mistaken, you're supposed to have 1.5 threads showing outside the nut for a proper joint.

Here is a closeup of the rear truss connection. There is a piece of aluminum hiding inside the crimped tube that also serves as a flex joint to get the right pitch angle to match the rear tail tube attachment point. The aluminum piece is thru bolted and also riveted in place.

I think most aero loading on this truss section will be small. Probably the landing and handling loads back here will be put more stress on this joint. I'm going to especially keep an eye on this one though because the aluminum could fatigue here if there are indeed significant loads over time.

There is one more area worthy of a closeup. This rear assembly is where the tailboom will eventually attach. I haven't done the side brackets that actually will transfer the loads from the boom into this section, but I think you can get the idea where these brackets will go.

For now, I had to tie the seat top tube and hold pressure on it because I'm shy a couple u-bracket pieces. That's why the string is showing.

I also will be going back over the next whenever and filing all the bracket and tube ends round, where appropriate. I definitely just skipped the finishing part in order to make a little more assembly progress.

To think, I started the rear section with this: