Day 67

It was a cold, snowy and windy day! The wind was blowing so hard it was pushing snow up through the cracks of the foundation into the shop. It piled up like six inches along the back wall… It was crazy. The poor heater couldn’t really keep up and it got super cold. Ended up going home to write today’s entry it was so cold.

Anyways, today we worked on assembling the rear seats. We have a split seat option for this build kit. This allows each of the backrest to fold down separately instead of as one. This allows for greater versatility in passenger versus storage capabilities. This also means that the seats are built separately instead of as a single unit. The framework of the rear seats differs from that of the front. The rear seats are two pieces of aluminum on either side of some c-channels creating the inner framework of the back rest.

Began by first clecoing the headrest channels, center two cross channels and lower channels to the back skin. Next place and cleco the front skin. Then the outside channels go up the sides and then rounds to meet the headrest section. There is also a hinge that goes on the bottom that will rivet to the bottom section later.

There were a few tricky parts to this build… First was trying to understand from the instructions if the outer channels were supposed to overlap, or go in between the skins. They were actually Cleco’ed incorrectly at first, but figured out how they were intended to go before riveting began. They’re meant to overlap on the outside of the panels. (It was confusing because the headrest section the channels go sandwiched between the skins.)

The other difficult part was not getting the left and right split sides mixed up. All the parts are the same for each side, but in a different orientation from side to side as to how they will latch and lock in place. There are holes that have to be drilled for rivnuts that are not pre-drilled and these also have to be in the correct orientation and are easy to mix up. The first few we got turned around and drilled the holes on the wrong side. The size hole was bigger than the biggest rivets we had available so we ran to the Bolt and Rivet Supply Store to see what they had. They had rivets that would fit the diameter (Only needed 5) but the mandrills were larger than what our gun could pull. So we drilled off the upper section of the outside channel that allowed a small access to the inside of the seat. From there we could reach our fingers inside and place backup washers on the backs of our 4.8mm rivets in the holes we had accidentally drilled too large. This worked to fix our mistake, and did not cause any issues with any of the other brackets that bolt on near the area.

All the rest of the rivnuts pulled perfectly, and didn’t have any other issues with the assembly. The latches don’t actually go on until after the seats have been upholstered, but we did set them on there to make sure everything lined up before we got to that part.

We were going to finish the bottom section of the seats today, but like was mentioned before, it was getting very uncomfortable and cold, so we will complete that tomorrow.

Exciting news, our motor mounts for the back of the firewall arrived! That means this week we can put the fuselage back up on a table and continue work on that. Couldn’t have arrived at a better time!