28 Oct 2023

Installed insulating foam on the fuselage bottom skins and sides under the baggage floor area, rear side of the luggage bulkhead, on the underside of the luggage floor skin and on the centre fuselage rear lower skin. I should have thought about the location of the COM 2 antenna for the centre fuselage rear lower skin at this point and made a cutout in the foam to suit it! Now I'll need to find a way to remove the foam for that, and when it sticks it stays stuck - a challenge for tomorrow.

Riveted the luggage floor support stringers, channel, angles and bulkhead support channels in place. I'm still waiting for the replacement rudder cables but can access the necessary areas to install them even with these components in place so I decided to continue with the installation.

Another gotcha - the KAI on page 12 specifically calls out not riveting the 4mm rivet holes which are used for the stainless steel rivets on the step support channels, but indicates that the other 7x 3.2mm (998) rivets should be installed into the bottom corners of rib 2 - and from the rear. The problem is, 3 of these rivets are used to attach the centre fuselage to the rear and of course you can't do that if the rivets are already installed. To make matters worse, installing the rivets from the rear makes it impossible to drill them out cleanly because the step support channels are in the way - and these are already riveted to the skins and so on so they cannot be removed. I eventually got them out, but not without elongating some of the holes slightly. To deal with this, I decided to upsize all 6 holes (3 left, 3 right) to 4mm and use 995 rivets when the time comes to join the two halves. It will solve the problem, but it should not have been necessary if the KAI was correct.