No photos tonight, it was just sort of menial work. I riveted the rear seatback hinge half in place, in assembly with the appropriate stiffener. Then there were four nutplates on each seat floor that needed to be riveted – which required final-drilling, deburring, and countersinking. There were also eight nutplates that needed to be riveted to the forward baggage floor before I could call this section of the manual done. I did notice that apparently I never did any edge finishing on that baggage floor, but I ran out of time to do that tonight.

The only thing left to do on these pieces now is to prime and paint them. Looks like this weekend might be a paint weekend at this rate; I also have the throttle quadrant and right console that are ready for painting, which takes me back to the topic of picking a black paint I want to use for those pieces.

Beyond that, we still need to go back and finish the riveting on the forward bottom skins – I took some time tonight to review the manual and make sure I had an understanding of the things I’d skipped over previously.

Once that’s done…it’s on to the horizontal stab. This thing is about to start looking a whole lot more like an airplane…

Not much to report tonight. I gave the seat floors a good cleaning and back riveted all but one of the stiffeners in place. The one I left iff gets riveted in assembly with the rear setback hinge – that’ll be on the docket for the next work session.

An interesting tidbit here: the instructions specifically say not to back rivet six of the stiffeners here, which are at the forward part of the two floors. I could not for the life of me figure out why I was supposed to delay those, so I asked around on VAF after the last session. The consensus seems to be that it’s to make it easier to install the floors, which does make sense – it takes some maneuvering and bending to work them around the bulkheads and such. But it really seems like a pain to rivet these after the floors are in place.

One person reported that he riveted his ahead of time and was able to get them in. His reasoning was that if he ever has to pull the floors, he’ll have to get them out with the stiffeners in place, might as well figure it out now. I’m thinking more in terms of being able to get these pieces primed and painted before installation – I’m trying to avoid, as much as possible, doing any painting in place inside the cabin.

So anyway, sometime next year when it comes time to install these for good, we’ll see if I end up regretting this decision. In the meantime, here’s a photo of a floor with some stiffeners:

I did it! Two days in a row of getting up and getting an early start out in the hangar. I started carrying my 6 AM weekday alarm into the weekends about a month ago, but until now I’ve just been turning it off and going back to sleep. I think getting going early in the morning is going to be important to maintaining momentum here.

I did still have a few hours distraction, between going to have coffee with neighbors and doing some other work around the house. It also doesn’t help that once midday rolls around, I can only handle about an hour or so in the hangar before I have to go inside, drink some water, and cool off. But at least I’m doing stuff and putting up with the heat and not just deciding it’s too hot to work.

Anyway, today I launched into prep work on the aft seat floors. There are ten stiffeners in total, and thanks to the taper in the fuselage, they come in five different sizes. I got all those separated and deburred, and clecoed the whole assembly together (both aft seat floors and all the stiffeners. Next was getting the bottom half of the hinge that will serve as the attach point for the base of the rear seat back. This only had a single #40 reference hole in it, so it had to be carefully aligned and drilled, using the prepunched holes in the floor as a guide.

Hey look, a photo of everything clecoed together!

Interestingly, the manual never actually says to final-drill the rivet holes between the floor and the stiffeners, but pretty quickly it jumps to deburring the dimpling them, and obviously final drilling is a prerequisite for that work. Then everything came apart and, yup, time for a bunch of deburring. This included not just the stiffeners’ rivet holes, but also all the #30 holes between the floors and the seat ribs in the fuselage, which were match-drilled a while back. And that meant deburring all those seat rib holes too…that was a bit tedious.

Finally, I broke out the squeezer and C-frame and got all those #40 holes dimpled. Next step: a bunch of back riveting!

This is actually where the manual gets a bit interesting. It says to rivet only some of the stiffeners, not all of them. I’m not really sure why some of them need to be delayed, I want to read ahead and see if I can figure it out. I’d prefer to get everything riveted in place and go ahead and prime and paint the floors, but I want to do that as late in assembly as possible, especially in this case since back riveting would probably mess up the paint and I’d have to touch it up.

At some point I need to go way back in the manual and finish riveting the forward bottom skins. Back when I was doing that, I got as much done as I could by myself, but decided to move on to other things and recruit Josie to help later on. Well, it’s really later on now…I did broach the subject, and she seemed up for it, Maybe we can get it done next weekend, or one night this week. If I recall correctly, it’s not really a ton of rivets, and could probably be done in one solid work session.

All this is just putting me ever closer to the really fun job of hanging the horizontal stab. Except I suppose I should tackle the service bulletin fix first; in case I ruin the thing, I’d rather not go through all the work of fitting it first…

Bit more progress today. A lot of the day was taken up with the monthly local RV people lunch, along with some other home-project stuff, but I got up early enough this morning to get some work in, and then got some more in after dark.

But yeah, it was just nutplates. First up were the four nutplates where the aft control mount will attach. These weren’t too hard, just had to set up the nutplates, drill the holes, countersink, and set the rivets.

The other two were more fun. Way back, just ahead of the baggage bulkhead, is where the two bearing blocks that support the ends of the flap weldment sit. One of the two holes for each block is prepunched, and that nutplate was riveted, I think, back before the seat angles were even installed. The second hole was drilled using the block as a guide, and now it was time to install those second nutplates. Access here is a lot more fun, since they sit really close to the fuselage side skins.

It was clear from the beginning that this would require the angle drill attachment. Drilling the holes went well, but then they had to be countersunk. There was no room for the countersink cage here, so I just threaded the countersink cutter into the angle drill extension, and sort of eyeballs the countersinks. And I just had to get a photo of this Rube Goldberg arrangement (side note: there’s a lot of mud dauber debris still down there):

Next up was figuring out how to rivet these. The construction manual suggests squeezing them using a pair of flat vise grip pliers. For one thing, that seems super ghetto to me. For another, I don’t have a pair of those. I elected instead to use blind rivets for these nutplates…way easier.

And then it was 11:00 and time to call it a night. Next up will be getting the stiffeners in place on the seat floors.I guess I should see about priming the cable anchor for the throttle quadrant at some point too…probably easier to do that on the weekend when I have plenty of daylight, vs trying to squeeze it in on a weekday evening.

Back at it again tonight. To start with, I took a look at the construction manual and confirmed I was basically done with the throttle quadrant section. The only remaining steps here are to prime and paint the throttle quadrant and cable anchor, but that wasn’t stuff I could do tonight. I do, however, need to think about what I’m going to do about paint for the quadrant. While I’ve been painting all the assorted interior stuff with the granite texture paint, I know I’m going to want the panel, for example, to be a different color. Probably the glareshield, too. And since the quadrant itself is black anodized aluminum, I kind of feel like the surrounding mount should be black as well. And then I’ll probably make the right-side console black also just for some sort of symmetry.

All that is to say that I’ll probably want to pick up some paint to test with soon. The final step in the quadrant section is to mount it in place in the fuselage, which seems like a point at which it ought to be final painted (though it is removable). Just something else to think about…

Anyway, with that section put to bed, I moved back to where I left off with the seat floors. I don’t even remember any more why I stopped in the middle of those and jumped ahead, I guess I should look back and see if I mentioned it at the time. But anyway, the first order of business was installing nutplates on a couple of floor support angles. This was a bit annoying, since said angles are already permanently mounted to the seat ribs. Ergo, I had to work inside the fuselage, and there wasn’t a ton of space.

The fun part was deciding how to put the nutplates in place to serve as drill guides. Normally I’d put them where they’ll be finally, and hold them in place with a screw, but in this case that would have required drilling the rivet holes with an angle drill. The other option was to screw them in place on the top/accessible side of the angle; that made drilling easy, but I had to use a stubby screwdriver at an awkward angle to hold them in place. But it wasn’t too bad:

With the holes drilled, I just had to countersink for flush rivets and rivet the nutplates in place. Done!

Next on the docket was the aft control mount. This is a beefy chunk of aluminum that, well, serves as a mount point for the control column. First order of business here was demurring the thing. That’s always fun on pieces like this made of super-thick material. The tooling marks on the edges are substantial and take a bit to remove. I ended up using a combination of the vixen file, bench grinder, and Dremel with assorted sanding bits to get this done.

Then it was time to pull the seat floors out of the fuselage, where they’ve been clecoed for…some time. Removing them was pretty easy, but that led to more fun. There were several sizable mud dauber nests hidden under them, so I got to spend some time removing them. By the time that was done, it was 10 PM and it seemed like a good time to quit for the evening.

I’m hoping that, before the weekend’s out, I can get those seat floors completed (I think they just need stiffeners cleaned up and riveted) and then primed and painted. We’ll see how that goes…

Yes, really. Just one minor detail though. Through all the fitting of the new three-lever quadrant, the one thing still left to do was to replace the pivot bolt with a longer one. Since I added a spacer to tweak the throttle’s lateral location a bit, this made the whole assembly a bit wider. I had the right bolts on hand to replace the four that hold the whole thing together, but not the pivot. The pivot bolt is capped by a little friction lock lever, followed by a nylock nut. With the original bolt, it was impossible to put any tension on the pivot.

So a few weeks ago, I decided to order the horizontal stabilizer SB kit from Van’s, and while I was at it, I threw in the one single AN bolt I needed to fix this up, and tonight was install night. And yes, it did take half an hour (a bit more actually) to replace one single bolt. See, first I had to unbolt the quadrant from its mount plate, and then disassemble the quadrant itself. The pivot bolt is actually held captive to one side of the quadrant by a little metal fitting, which traps the bolt head against the side plate. This fitting is riveted on, so I had to drill out the old rivets and then re-rivet it with the new bolt in place.

The pivot bolt also needs more thread depth than a standard AN bolt, so I had to get out the tap & die set and cut some additional threads. Then everything got assembled one more time. And viola – now I have a quadrant with a functional friction lock!

In other news, I’ve had the build on my mind a lot lately. Been doing a lot of more concrete research and budgeting for the big purchases, particularly the engine. The basic engine choice is either a box-stock Lycoming or a slightly-more-polished Lycoming Thunderbolt, both available directly from Van’s. Then there are a number of aftermarket builders out there. I’m really wanting to be closer to 200hp than the 180 provided by a regular old IO-360. An angle-valve 360 will provide that, but there’s a weight penalty (about 30 pounds) and also a nontrivial financial one.

Another option is a stroked 360; these are sold by both Aero Sport Power in Canada and Titan in Alabama. The result is a 371ci engine, but for some reason Aero Sport calls it a 375, while Titan calls it a 370. Anyway, I put in a quote request to Aero Sport a few weeks ago for an IO-375. It took about a week to get a response, and the quote was…um…high. It made that angle-valve 360 seem like a bargain in comparison, and was pretty disheartening.

Titan, meanwhile, claimed on their site that the -370 “started” at something like $27k. It almost seemed to good to be true, especially compared to the Aero Sport quote, which was over $10k higher than that figure. So last week I shot an email to James Ball, who’s the official POC for Titan. I was impressed when not only did he get back to me (answering my barrage of questions) within about an hour, but he also provided me a best-guess quote that was extremely competitive with the stock Lycoming offerings.

Long story short, I was super happy with Titan, both from a customer-service and value perspective, and I’m pretty well set on buying an engine from them now. If I put a deposit down before the end of August, I’ll get the $500 Oshkosh discount, and James said he might be able to get me free shipping too (not a trivial amount since it has to come freight). I have a bit of legwork to do to get the funds lined up, but I think I’m going to go ahead and order next month.

I’m really trying to firm up a lot of these decisions. Last year after Oshkosh I decided my goal would be to fly the -8 up for my next trip in 2020. I haven’t made very good use of the past year, but I do still want to make that goal. It’s not going to be easy, but getting ahead of stuff like this will help. Obviously, the main requirement is that I get my butt out in the garage and get work done more often.

So technically, this work session tool place over two days. I started working on this stuff last night and got about half an hour in before a certain dog decided to eat a large piece of rope and we had to take him to the vet. Fun times…

Anyway, to start with I got the filler piece riveted to the throttle cover plate, now that the primer had had time to cure. The double-flush rivet idea worked pretty well; the shop heads sit just slightly proud of the surface, but not enough to make things look bad.

Next up was making another filler piece to go between the inboard edge of the throttle and the mount. To get things lined up for the pushrod to the rear throttle, I’d used two washers to space the throttle slightly outboard, which works out to 1/8” of spacing. Which just happened to be the thickness of the raw stock I bought for the filler, so I cut another narrow piece to use as this second spacer. Clamped it to the mount, drilled the two bolt holes, nothing to it.

This was followed by just a bunch of test-fitting with various parts of the throttle assembly. I ended up having to trim that filler strip a bit, as it interfered with the cover plate. But eventually it all came together. Now that unsightly gap is gone (though there’s still a slight gap on the outboard edge, but such is life):

And here’s the whole assembly clecoed into place in the fuselage:

I still haven’t put the handles back on the throttle because I’m not quite done with it yet. Adding the spacers to move it outboard means that I need longer bolts to go through the assembly. I had the right bolts on hand for the four mounting bolts (the heads of these are visible in the photo above), but there’s a fifth bolt that acts as the pivot point for the levers, and on its inboard side the friction adjustment lever attaches. I don’t have the right length bolt replace that one, so the friction thing can’t work right just yet.

I may go ahead and order that bolt from Spruce, along with some other stuff. One useful tip I saw from a guy on VAF was to keep a running list of more expensive build items that will be needed eventually. Then, if some small part (like an individual bolt) is needed, I can just add the expensive part to the order and get free shipping. Otherwise, it’s just dumb to order a $1 bolt and pay like $5 for shipping. Though for the moment I’ll probably just add the bolt to my running shopping list. While I do want to get the throttle finished up, it’s not really super urgent or anything.

Oh, and I finished up this evening’s work by doing the simple task that sent me on this whole throttle-modification odyssey: I riveted the four nutplates onto the throttle cover plate. At this point I’m done with this section of the construction manual, but I need to go back and look at the stuff I skipped earlier, with the rear floors and stuff. I also still have some riveting on the bottom of the fuselage to do, which will require a second set of hands.

So, as mentioned last time, I decided to fab up a spacer to fill the unsightly gap between the throttle quadrant and the cover plate. Last time I said I was working a Spruce order, well, I actually ended up ordering the material from…wait for it…Amazon. It was significantly cheaper than Spruce for the same alloy and amount of material. If this had been something structural, I probably wouldn’t have done this, but it’s just cosmetic. I also ordered way more material than I actually needed, enough to make four spacers if I wanted. I figured I might mess one up, after all. Predictably, the first one came out fine.

Anyway, tonight was just a lot of semi-painstaking fitting. I’d been thinking through the procedure of fitting this thing the way I wanted it, so tonight was just putting that into effect (and figuring out all the weird issues I didn’t think before). To start with, I cut one of my two plates in half, which gave me the rough size of raw material I needed for a spacer. I had to trim off one corner to match the angle at the back of the cover plate as well, since this has to nest in there. Then came the first fun bit: the cover plate’s inboard edge has a radius, and I wanted this spacer to nest in there nicely, so I needed to take the square edge of the raw plate and shape it to match that radius.

It took me a bit to figure out the best tool for this job. At first I tried the file but that seemed too rough. The scotchbrite wheel on the grinder was nice and smooth but removed material super slowly. So i ended up doing most of the rough shaping with a cutting bit on the Dremel, and fine-tuning the shape with the scotchbrite wheel. After lots of trial and error, I ended up with this:

With the rounding of the edges done, the spacer piece could now nest fully into place where it belonged against the cover plate. So I clamped it in place and traced the outline of the cutout in the cover plate:

Then rough-cut it with the bandsaw:

The cutout section in the spacer plate is intentionally a bit smaller than the opening in the cover plate. The plan was to final-shape both piece in assembly, to hopefully get as smooth a combined edge as possible. For now, though, it’s still rough:

Next up, I clamped the spacer in place and laid out and drilled my rivet holes. The spacer will just get flush riveted to the cover plate. Here I’ve already dimpled the cover plate and countersunk the spacer:

A lot of material had to come off the outboard edge; the cover plate sits against an angle piece on the outer skin, so the spacer can’t interfere. Technically this trim was done in the previous photo, but it’s easier to see the extent of it here:

Next the spacer got some edge cleanup, removing burrs and smoothing everything out, then I clecoed it to the cover plate again and went to work final-trimming the edges that needed to be aligned with the cover plate. This was just a bunch of filing and Dremeling and sanding and polishing and smoothing and checking and blah blah blah. In the end it’s not quite perfect, but workable as far as I’m concerned. This photo’s a little blurry, but oh well, Should have used macro mode, I suppose:

As I was doing this, though, I did realize I’d neglected to consider one thing. The top plate of the throttle quadrant is larger than the cutout on the cover plate, so the spacer plate will rest on top of that throttle top plate. This is a problem because of the rivets – if I’d set them without thinking about this, the cover plate wouldn’t be able to sit flush against the throttle due to the shop heads of the rivets. Fortunately, there’s an easy way to handle this – I countersunk the other side of the holes in the spacer plate, and I’ll just set the rivets double-flush. if I need to I can even sand the shop heads down a bit – it wouldn’t be best practice for a structural piece, but here it’ll be no problem.

But before I could rivet, I needed to shoot primer on the spacer. So I got that done, and set the piece aside. I’ll probably see about getting it riveted tomorrow night, and then I can trial-fit everything together and see what it looks like. I think what I’m going to do here as far as paint is make the entire quadrant mount black, rather than using the stone-texture paint like everywhere else. The idea will be that the instrument panel, right console (which will house some switches), and throttle quadrant will all be black and sort of match. It remains to be seen what paint I’ll actually use here, though…that’s a problem for later.

Had a little time tonight, so I went out and did some thinking about dealing with that unsightly gap on the forward throttle quadrant. I posted about my problem on VAF but I’ve gotten no responses, so I dunno if the solution is stupid obvious or no one else cared about this gap or what. Regardless, I think I’ve settled on a solution.

The gap between the top of the quadrant and the cover plate is right at 1/8”, so I think I’m just going to fabricate a spacer out of some 1/8” thick aluminum stock. To this end, I’ve got am Aircraft Spruce order working for the necessary raw material. I’m going to attempt to make the spacer in one piece, which should look the best, I think.

And yes, I spent a full hour mulling over this, and disassembling/reassembling various things multiple times.