Cabin projects and more
Hours: 7.2 | Posted in Cabin & InteriorLots of stuff done today, mostly focusing on the cabin area: first, a thorough vacuuming session of the whole fuselage to remove all the shavings and other schmutz, then the seat pans were installed with pop rivets. Then I added #30 drain holes just behind each of the rear fuselage bulkheads, and vacuumed again. While I was back there, I riveted the aft end of the armrests, which had been missed previously. I had the fuselage on its side again for most of today’s session…it’s not too hard to pick up the forward end and roll it by hand. Also attached nutplates to the baggage side wall panels and clecoed them in, to get them off the bench.
Upper firewall gusset plates riveted in place…over half of these can be done with the squeezer, but I used the gun on the four forward rivets. I may have been able to do them with the long no-hole yoke, but I’ve had mixed results using that on 470-4 rivets before; the extra flex in the longer yoke seems to make them more prone to tipping, rather than setting properly.
Fabricated the various parts for the manual roll trim assembly, and installed that temporarily. This will come apart later for priming with the next batch, as my trial with the Preval sprayer didn’t go so well–the AFS primer needs to be thinned down quite a bit for it to successfully spray in the unit, and then it lays down extremely heavy, which causes puddles, runs, and poor finish. I should pick up a few cans of Napa 7220 or GBP 988 for little parts like this… After the roll trim assembly was in place, the forward seat pans were clecoed in. (I did drill the roll trim handle as well, but have left it off for now to ease repeated removal/installation of the seat pans.)
Finally, fabricated the forward tunnel cover, which is made of a piece of .040 sheet and a couple pieces of Z-channel. The sheet is bent to match the angle of the seat pans at the forward end, and the Z-channel is trimmed to fit the various angles and pieces it needs to clear. A nutplate is installed on the seat pan to secure the forward end. Easy enough…this too will come out for priming later.
The next step in the book is to install the various covers and such that go forward of the spar carrythru; I will skip at least some of that for the moment, since I don’t want to box myself in with the installation of the FI boost pump, which requires some modification to the center tunnel cover — I need to order those parts from Vans to rig this up. That means the next big thing is the flap system…first moving parts of the fuselage!
