Joshua's RV-9A Project

Heard back from Van’s on Tuesday about the seat pan ribs — Joe said it was alright to have the elongated holes, just use a nut and washer.  I’ll be more careful, next time, really!  (Browsing his build log for an unrelated topic, I saw that Chad Jensen actually made the same mistake; he fixed it by a different method–widening the crotch strap brackets–which would have been easier, had I any suitable scrap sheet…)

So tonight, after buying some paint supplies at Menard’s, I shot interior color on the side skins and longerons.  The paint goes on pretty nice with the gun (thinned 8oz/quart with xylol); I think it’s even easier to get an even finish than with the rattle cans, though of course the rattle cans are easier to deal with, esp. for small parts.  Also shot a scrap piece with some tan textured paint we picked up to try for the rudder pedals…I’ll give the test piece to my interior designer (hi, Allison…) for evaluation.

After the joy of painting ended, I squeezed nutplates onto the various uprights and stiffeners that receive them, and did some other riveting: the gear attach webs, spacers, and tank attach angles; that whole assembly to the side bulkhead uprights, the little angle “clips” to the side stiffeners, and the lower longeron gussets to the firewall side angles.  Touched up primer in a couple spots that needed it on some of the pieces.

Lastly, I addressed the center section: clecoed the two now-correctly-placed ribs in place and drilled the 3/16″ holes, then removed for deburring, spot primed where needed, and re-clecoed in place.  Once they were fit, I riveted their fore and aft ends to the bulkheads.  One hole in the lower rear spar got a little messed up in the drilling out earlier, and rivets kept clinching over; that one ended up with a short AN3 bolt (always a defeating moment, but probably the best thing to do…and no one will ever see it down there anyway).

Tomorrow, I hope to finish re-riveting those two ribs (easy), and start putting the fuselage back together for final riveting.

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 14th, 2010 at 10:23 pm and is filed under Center Fuselage. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.