I decided to go ahead with the top coat and to paint the cockpit dark grey. The paint was thinner and spayed quickly and easily. I did two fog coats, and then a wet coat. I’ll plan to do one final coat tomorrow to fill in areas where i missed, or went too light. It’s hard to tell what it will look like once dry, but I’m hoping it will be decent.
Tonight I applied another coat of light grey primer to the whole cockpit area. There are a few spots where access is difficult with the spray gun, so I rotated the fuselage around a few times to aid with access.
I have a darker grey finish coat that I’m planning to apply next. Painting is a lot of work, and I’m not great at it, so I’m considering just leaving it light grey and moving on. My only concern with leaving it light grey is the possible reflections on the canopy. The downside of a darker color is more heat trapped in the cockpit on hot sunny days.
I will see how I’m feeling about it tomorrow.
Tonight I cleaned the cockpit with rubbing alcohol, and rotated the fuselage upside down in preparation for paint.
I have some new paint that arrived, smoke grey color, which will be used to coat the cockpit. I want to tune up my paint system before I start on the cockpit, so I will start by painting the rudder peddles.
Tonight I finished masking up the cockpit in preparation for painting. I used dowels in the nutplates to hopefully prevent any paint from fouling up the threads.
The area will need a final clean up with alcohol before I can start spraying.
Today at lunchtime I quickly finished setting the final rivets in the baggage area, completing the chapter. Next I will be painting the cockpit, and then installing the brakes and rudder pedals.
Yesterday I was able to install the flap motor channel and flap motor brackets, and today I installed the baggage compartment side walls. Actually, I didn’t quite finish; there are some rivets I will need to buck tomorrow to wrap up. It is too late in the evening to start riveting.
The pop riveting is so fast, it’s really amazing how quickly and easily it all comes together. I wouldn’t attempt this without a pneumatic squeezer though, it would be painful to manually set these hundreds of rivets. I made extensive use of the “wedge tool”. I found it very useful to have a piece of tape on the little wedge so I could tape it into the correct orientation before setting the rivet.
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.
