26 Oct 2023

Riveted centre fuselage floor ribs to the front spar carry through, landing gear box and rear spar carry through per the KAI - this needed the hand riveter due to space limitations. The two brackets which I believe are for the front seatbelts (I think the part numbers were 024 angles) were badly formed by the factory and needed to be slightly rebent, ground a bit and slightly notched on one side to clear the rivnuts in the adjacent floor ribs and conform to the landing gear box profile and floor rib holes. The primer was touched up on these parts after the adjustments.

These particular brackets make a bit of a cameo appearance a few pages late in the KAI without any instructions to install them, no inclusion in the parts list and are very difficult to identify unless you're really paying attention to the diagram. They would be far easier to install BEFORE the main spar is riveted to the floor ribs, since it becomes impossible to fit a drill and reamer into the space between the main spar and landing gear box to install the 995 rivets.

The KAI calls for 3.2mm x 8mm rivets (998's) to attach the floor ribs to the rear spar carry-through. These look a bit short, I have queried it with the factory although no alternative rivets appear to have been supplied anyway. Speaking of which, most of the centre fuselage rivets were supplied completely mislabelled and in some cases with mix rivets in on pack. I've experienced way too many packing issues with the fuselage, Sling really needs to improve in this area. It's frustrating and must be costing them a fortune in rework, re-shipping and so on. There are also a number of errors in the fuselage KAI in this section of the build and it's not as complete and intuitive as the wings and empennage manuals.