This afternoon it was time to make the firewall in order to be able to continue joining the forward and aft fuselage. I attached the CAD drawing I made earlier to the stainless steel sheet and started cutting and drilling. The drilling the stainless steel is not as bad as some people told me it would be. I used cobalt drill bits designed for drilling stainless and lots of cutting fluid, wasn't too difficult at all (I went through 3 bits though at $3.75 each). Afterwards I needed to bend the flanges, the sheet is just too big for my bending brake so I clamped the whole thing to the table and used "the pounding with mallet" method. Finally I removed the CAD drawing from the metal, this is very easy, just soak it with some WD-40 and it comes right of, then it's just a matter of cleaning it up with some mineral turps.
