Today I finished the baggage floor, and installed the splice. Then I installed nutplates on the flap motor bracket, which is now ready to install. Everything went well, except the final rivets between the floors and the side ribs. These holes were not well aligned, and I needed to ream them somewhat to get rivets into the holes.
Today I finished the pop rivets on the baggage floors. The remaining rivets, those between the floor and the rear bulkhead, need to be set with a rivet gun. It’s too late in the evening to be pounding rivets, so I moved onto the next step, and installed the seat back hinges.
More progress on the baggage floor riveting tonight. I worked mostly on the right side floor, getting it almost to the same point as the left side. This has been a relatively easy riveting job so far, although I’m saving the harder rivets until the end. Hopefully I can wrap up this step over the next couple of days.
Tonight I started riveting the baggage floor. I started on the left side of the fuselage, and set all of the pull rivets, except for those oblong the outside edge. For the edge, I think it will be easier to roll the fuselage onto the other side, so that gravity helps keep the squeezer correctly oriented.
It’s so easy doing pop rivets with the pneumatic squeezer, and I was able to cover a lot of ground in just an hour or so. It’s also quiet, and I was able to work on this late at night without keeping anyone awake.
Tonight I installed the baggage floors, final sized some nutplate holes, and then clecoed the floors to the substructure. before I started, I spent time carefully cleaning out the under-floor area. Using a damp cloth I wiped all the surfaces, then vacuumed everything with a brush-head fitting.
The next step is to rivet these floors down using a variety of rivets. I’ll be making good use of the pneumatic pulled-rivet squeezer, along with my hand squeezer, and rivet gun.
I was doing some reading ahead and studying some other build logs today. I was trying to figure out if I should do anything extra before I permanently install the baggage floors.
I replaced a pop rivet that had been set poorly while joining the fuselage. There are only a couple of them, and one had gone in on an angle, so I removed and replaced.
Next I noticed that some builders installed additional adel clamps next to the fuel pump to hold the wiring bundles securely. The problem is, there are no nutplates installed, so people struggled with nuts and bolts. I saved that pain by installing some nutplates on the fuel pump mount. Interestingly, the holes for a nutplate are already there, and the Quickbuild kit even has dimpled rivet holes. So I installed some nutplates for future use. Access is super tight, but I was able to get my hand squeezer in there to set the rivets. I used K1000-08d nutplates
Tonight I just had a few minutes, and managed to complete a couple of steps installing nutplates on the baggage floors. This was very straightforward, nothing interesting to report.
Today I primed all of the baggage area parts. This included the floors and side panels, and flap motor bracket.
For some reason the paint job was not as good as I had hoped. I still need to figure out how to optimize the spray gun to get consistently good finishes. My guess is that I’ve not got the right ratio of paint to air, and that I’m blowing too little paint. The finish is rough, like a fine sand paper, which is possibly caused by paint particles that are already dry, sticking to the part. It’s not terrible, and it’s just primer, but I will soon be painting the cockpit, and I want it to look good.
Today I dimpled and countersunk the parts needed for completing the baggage area. Most of the work was dimpling the floors, but some countersinking was needed in a couple of places.
Dimpling was easy enough, although I made a mistake and dimpled the 4 CS-4 rivet holes using my regular #30 dimple dies with 120 degree dimples. I then realized my mistake and redid them with my 100 degree dimples dies. Not great, but it will be ok. I correctly dimpled the corresponding rib holes, after I carefully measured to make sure I identified the correct holes.
Today I torqued up all the bolts on the aileron, and lock nuts on the aileron pushrods. The lock nuts on the pushrods use thin jam nuts, so I referred to AC43 page 7-9 table 7-1 and used the 320 nut values. For the short pushrod this was 40, and the longer one, 100 inch pounds.
I applied torque seal on all the nuts I final torqued.
I also took the opportunity to apply touch up paint to the pushrods, painting over the ends of the aluminum rivets in the shorter pushrod.
