Time: 6 Hours
I made some good progress today in prep for painting and assembly of the bulkheads and baggage area. I riveted the 2 support angles to the baggage floor, all the nutplates to the angles and lower bulkhead.
In this process I realized that I made a big error on my baggage floor prior to making the center cut for my modification. On the left side of the baggage floor, the farthest away from the baggage door, there are 4 screws that hold that end of the floor in place. These screws will go through the baggage floor and into nutplates on the floor support. I accidentally drilled the 2 wing holes for the nutplates, all 8 of them, through the nutplate wings and through the baggage floor! Oops those are for the rivets to hold the nutplates in place and if I riveted them through all the holes the screws would be useless and the floor would now be permanently installed. So now I have 8 holes that I don’t know what to do with. At breakfast today with the builders I was given and idea and told to come over to his shop. Super-Fil to the rescue! This is a epoxy filler, like bondo for cars. It will dry hard and will be easily sandable.
So now that the day was saved with the Super-Fil I moved on to adding a 2″ pass thru flange for my cool air supply to the cockpit. There is a NACA vent on left side of the forward fuselage that will scoop air for the cockpit. This vent connects to a 2″ duct hose that goes to a eyeball vent on the dash. Van’s has you just hang the duct which doesn’t look that great. So I’m using a aluminum pass thru and eventually an elbow so that the duct hose won’t be seen and it will be hidden. I measured where I thought it should go and looked at my buddies as well. I cut the hole with a step bit and finished the rest with the dremel.
Since the primer was dry on the upper bulkhead I started that riveting so I could paint tomorrow. First was the doubler followed by the single nutplate for the hinge pin and the 3 Cam-Loc’s.
I need to rivet all the baggage floor supports before I can paint but need to wait for the Super-Fil to dry and will get to it tomorrow. That’s all I can do today and will get back at it tomorrow.
