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.
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.
