Question with respect to a building preference - do you prefer to complete an assembly as much as possible, or to temporarily clamp as much as possible together? I can see reasons either way, I guess, but I'm to a point where I have a couple of fuselage frames in "temporary" fasteners. I can either spend time to finish these off and "make permanent" the fasteners, then proceed to tie the frames together with the longeron-like parts, or I can leave the frames as-is, do the axial tying-together with the longeron parts, and have more stuff to debur / clean up before gonig back for final fasteners.

Maybe this question is too dependent on the context - what is an assembly? What "unit level" do you consider worthy of completing out before proceeding? When I was building a riveted sheet metal design, the answer was easy - when the clecoes run out, it's time to rivet. And I had ~300 clecoes in the main rivet size. But with this tube-and-gusset construction, it seems like there's a bunch of build it up to see that it all fits; drill what I can to final size; take all that back down for debur and clean-off; build back up with final fasteners...etc. Though even this is somewhat self-limiting when you get to a point where clecoes get in the way of being able to bolt more stuff on...

Curious to hear others' thoughts on how much to build before things have to go "final".

Oh, and this is a plans-built, no kit, so I've already spent over a year making items that are not fastened to anything else at all...yet.