This was a busy week around the house but I still managed to keep some momentum on the airplane. The next task on the list was fabricating and installing the hinges that attach both seat backs to the cabin floor.

There’s not much to installing these hinges. Trimming the hinge material is trivial, and the only gotcha is to make sure the hinge spacing from the inboard seat floor edge is actually measured from the edge, and not from the center of the nutplate holes as the plans trick you into believing if you’re not careful.

Although I didn’t take any pictures of the process, I laid out and drilled rivet holes on one hinge plate and used it as a template to match-drill the other hinges. It was easy then to clamp the hinges onto the floor and match-drill first to #40, and then final-drill to #30 for the rivets.

Only one or two of the rivets can be squeezed, and I don’t have a C-frame dimpler/riveter, so I just laid out my backrivet plate on the workbench and used it as a bucking bar as I drove the rivets from the top. Worked pretty good. The hinge material is a little on the soft side, which causes them to distort a little when riveted but I can still get a hinge pin in.

Here’s the copilot side ready to be blind-riveted to the seat ribs. The other side looks pretty much the same, except for one problem.

Turns out that one of the pilot’s seatbelt anchors somehow got tweaked out of alignment, and I wasn’t too keen on bashing it back into alignment with a hammer or pliers. This had to be fixed before I can blind-rivet the seat floor, which means drilling out a lot of blind rivets and hard-to-reach solid rivets…merde!

So, I spent my entire shop time on Sunday drilling out all the rivets that attach the left baggage floor, so I could yank it out for access to the anchor bolt. It took a lot of time to *very* carefully remove all the solid-riveted nutplates, because many of them were in corners or in hard-to-reach areas.

With the solid rivets and nutplates removed, I used an ATS Blind Rivet Removal Tool to drill out all the blind rivets – this gadget worked like a champ, unlike other ATS-made tools I’ve owned. The tool’s drill bit is surrounded by a spring-loaded serrated collar that applies pressure to the rivet head when the tool is pressed onto it, keeping the rivet from spinning in the hole as the drill bit does its thing. Driving out the steel mandrel from the blind rivet is essential, since it can cause the drill bit to wander as it punches through the rivet.

After cleaning up all the rivet carcasses, mandrels and shavings, I reinstalled and retorqued the offending seat belt bracket and declared success for the day. It was a lot of work, but worth it to get the job done right.

Thanks to the leadership of Our Elected Officials™, I won’t be working Fridays for the rest of the fiscal year (that’s the end of September for all you non-government folks) and today was the first day off. They call it a furlough, but I like to think of it as an unpaid holiday – helps me to not focus on the money we’re diverting from Whitney’s tuition to pay our bills.

But an extra day off every week will be great for progress on the RV, so there is a bit of a bright side to government incompetence.

First up today was fitting the baggage compartment tunnel cover.  The fit on this part was, shall we say, crappy…I had to apply some kinetic manipulation (i.e., a block of wood and a hammer) to get the rear flange to fit correctly.

The fit still isn’t great, but I was able to get screws in all the mounting holes without enlarging them.  Good enough for government work…if I had been working for the government yesterday.

With the baggage tunnel cover in place, I moved on to the baggage area flap covers which isolate the flap actuator arms from the rest of the baggage compartment.  These were a piece of cake…drill holes to final size, debur, dimple the nutplate rivet holes, and attach the nutplates.

That’s the end of the baggage compartment work, it’s on to the seats.

I’ve had the baggage compartment bulkhead walls sitting around for several years, it was nice to finally break them out for installation.  Fitting the bottom bulkhead wall is easy, there are prepunched holes that match the platenuts previously installed on the baggage floor.

Once the wall bottom was attached with screws, I worked my way up from the bottom, match-drilling the bulkheads through prepunched holes on the sides.

The top of the wall requires a little more work.  The upper corners must be trimmed on an 8.5 inch radius, so I borrowed a tip from Mike Bullock and cut a template from stiff paper to lay out the cut line.  It was a little tricky tracing and cutting through the wall’s deep corrugations, but with a little filing and trimming they look fine.

With the corners radiused, I laid out and drilled the remaining wall-to-bulkhead screw holes and match-drilled the wall to the bulkhead.  Nothing too tricky here.

For some reason, it was pretty motivational to see this bulkhead wall in place…makes the fuselage seem more “finished.”

I broke out the #8 nutplate jig, drilled the bulkhead for nutplates, dimpled both the nutplates and mounting holes, and installed the nutplates.

The shoulder harness restraint cables penetrate the bulkhead well, so I laid out and cut slots for the cables.  There are a couple of pieces of UHMW plastic that get fitted around these slots to provide a wear surface, so I trimmed and drilled them to the upper and lower walls.

I’m saving the wear block final installation until the walls are painted.  I’ll probably do that sooner than later, since we want to see how our interior color choice (JetFlex WR “Pepperdust”) looks.  I can paint the wall parts, and if we don’t like the color, I can strip ’em down and find another color.