Our seats arrived today from Luke and the folks at Classic Aero Designs…they’re very nice, well worth the investment. My good friend Jim has the same seat model in his RV-7 and one ride in his airplane was enough to convince me that these are the ones we wanted.

I’ve been holding my breath on the choice of interior colors, seat leather, and shoulder harnesses. We made our choices two years ago based on leather swatches from Classic Aero, harness material samples from Hooker, and paint chips from Sherwin Williams.  It all looked good in small scale, but there’s no way to tell until everything comes together in the cockpit.

Now that the seats are next to the walls and floor panels we’ve painted with JetFlex, I think we made the right choice…or to be more accurate, Ellen made the right choice.  She did all the color coordination and everything looks great!

Another picture? Sure, why not…

The only downside is that now we know the interior paint color is correct, I’ve got to buy more of it at $120/quart…yikes.

Some days you spend a lot of time in the shop and don’t get much done…a lot of lateral or backward motion, without a lot of forward progress. The last few days were like that.

I mentioned in the last couple of posts that I needed to fabricate an aluminum line that connects the fuel selector to the fuel filter/pump.  Turns out that Van’s ships its RV-7 fuselage kits with 8 feet of 3/8″ diameter aluminum tubing for fabricating all the fuse fuel plumbing, and I used just about all of that trying – and failing – to make one simple damn 8-inch line.

You might think from the picture above that I got it just about right, but there’s just not enough space left at the top of the line to attach the same AN coupling that’s on the other end. So I did what any good civil servant does – I threw money at the problem. I ordered some right-angle AN fluid fittings from Aircraft Spruce that I hope will solve the problem. More to follow…

The next item on my punch list was fitting the forward fuel line covers. Before I could do that some clean-up work was necessary – mounting and torquing a couple of corner gussets that take the place of landing gear weldments for the RV-7A main gear.

Sorry, this is a crappy pic but you get the idea. I’d actually finished these gussets several months ago, but the left one (pictured here) needed some work with a file to clear one of the skin-to-spar rivets. Once the gussets were in place, I moved on to mounting the forward tunnel covers.

The covers themselves are easy, but support angles on each cover’s outboard end require some sheet metal gymnastics to fit and drill to the heavy F-7101 gussets on each side of the fuse. Fortunately, I used a technique devised by fellow RV builder Mike Bullock, and it worked like a champ. I won’t steal Mike’s glory, so here are the highlights.

Here’s a piece of scrap angle clamped in place through the fuel line access hole, to provide a fore/aft reference for the actual support angle. It’s adjusted so it’s flat against the cover.

Here’s the support angle itself, already trimmed and pre-drilled according to plans, clamped to the scrap angle with a piece of 0.020″ scrap in between to simulate the forward cover.

With the support angles clamped in place, I match-drilled them to the F-7101 gussets with a #40 drill bit, which will eventually be upsized to #30.  I used a drill stop to avoid drilling through the outside skins.

Here are the covers match-drilled to the support angles; when they’re done the covers will be attached to the angles with #8 screws. All that’s left is to enlarge the holes to final size and debur everything. It took several hours to fit and drill these parts, but everything came out fine.

Thanks for the great instructions, Mike!

Ellen and I spent the weekend getting our daughter reinstalled in college. After a record-setting (for us) 5.8 hour drive back from Delaware to Boston, we’re both feeling flashbacks of empty-nest syndrome.

Before we left, I made the basic fuel selector/filter/pump housing structure including the fuel selector mounting plate.

This afternoon I fitted the selector, including installing nutplates on the selector for the #10-32 screws that attach it to the plate and selector fascia. NAS1097AD3 reduced-head rivets made the job easy.

Here’s the selector valve and plate temporarily attached to the forward seat floor structure, with the filter and pump laid out on the tunnel cover. Tomorrow I’ll fabricate the “?” shaped fuel line that connects the selector to the filter, and will then check to make sure that there’s enough space for the pump output line to exit and submerge through the cutout I’ve marked in blue on the tunnel.

If everything fits correctly, the pump housing should fit nicely over the whole assembly.

It’s been a little while since my last post, we’ve been busy with family and work. Here’s an update on the fuselage work I’ve done in the last couple of weeks.

Sometimes the most simple things take extra work, like fabricating this simple little tunnel from one piece of sheet metal and two pieces of z-channel. This thing didn’t fit quite as the plans said it should so I had to find some scrap sheet for a replacement…but it’s done.

With the aft tunnel cover finished I started on the heater plenum/forward tunnel cover and fuel valve/fuel pump. Bending the heater plenum louvers didn’t go quite as well as I wanted, but they look mostly ok and no one will ever see them anyway.

I purchased an Andair FS20x7 fuel selector valve, FX375-M fuel filter and PX375-TC fuel pump a couple of years ago and have been looking forward to fitting them. In the pic above everything is clecoed together in anticipation of laying out and drilling the fuel selector and filter/pump mounting holes. The 3/8″ fuel line that connects the two is a bit tricky to bend and I don’t want to lock everything down til I can test fit the whole assembly.

More to follow…

The weather this morning was beautiful, so I rolled the fuselage outside to get some pictures with most of the skins on and the test-painted interior panels in place. All that work on the rolling fuse stand was worth it, by the way.

Looks pretty good, I think…almost like an airplane fuselage!

The interior color looks pretty good…hopefully it’s not too light to cast a lot of reflections on the canopy. Ellen likes it, and I think we’ll stick with it. Our seats are on the way from Luke and the folks at Classic Aero Designs. By the end of the month we’ll be able to sit in the airplane for the first time!

Back from Oshkosh, and the batteries are recharged for more work on the airplane.

One of the goals for this weekend was to paint some of the interior panels with our chosen color.  I splurged on a modestly-priced HVLP spray gun – a DeVilbiss Finish Line FLG-4, which is significantly better than the average Harbor Freight $39.95 chinese knockoff gun.

The weather was perfect for painting, it didn’t take long to get some JetFlex on the baggage compartment bulkhead and two seat floors.  Considering that this was my first attempt at “finish” painting, I think everything turned out well.  JetFlex dries rapidly, and I hung the parts up to dry overnight.

Before I left for Oshkosh, I installed but didn’t rivet the left baggage compartment floor and both rear seat floors.  So the first order of business was breaking out the pneumatic squeezer and pop riveter to rivet the floors in place.  Having done the baggage floor once, it didn’t take long to do it again. The downside? My hands are well and truly tired from using the blind rivet squeezer…but the floors are done.

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.