Welp, it’s been a long time…again. It’s been a fun few months of back injuries and such, which culminated in back surgery last week. The good news is that I’m feeling a lot better after said surgery. The better news is that I’ve been working from home this week while I recover, which affords me the opportunity to get out and work on the plane a lot earlier in the day. An opportunity which I, of course, squandered until today.
Technically, I never finished the bottom skin riveting, but while I’m feeling better, I’m still not up for the bending/crawling/etc that would be required for finishing that up, so I decided to skip ahead to the next stage, which is working on the interior – seat floors and such. I started tonight by working on the footwells for the rear seat. Each footwell is made up of three parts: an flat angled piece that makes up the “bottom” of the well and two web pieces that make up the side.
The first job is some trimming of those bottom pieces; the corners need to be cut off so they can properly nest inside the web pieces. This seemed simple at first, but given the location of the trims, ended up requiring a fair amount of trial and error and fine-tuning with a file. Here’s a look at a trimmed (left) vs untrimmed (right) corner:
A close-up of the trimmer corner with the web cloches in place:
And a general look at the assembly clecoed together:
After I finished doing all the trimming, I went ahead and demurred all the pieces, then clecoed together the right footwell assembly and put it in place just for a look at the thing in context. Obviously there will be actual floors in place here too eventually:
So that was it for tonight. Next on the docket is a lot more fitting of interior parts; a look ahead in the manual shows that I’m gonna be playing with all the rear seat floors, the baggage compartment pieces, the flap actuator weldment, and much more. Maybe if I get some good momentum going I can have some pieces ready for priming and painting this weekend; we’ll see how that goes.