Because there are only a few parts to be primed on the Main Bulkhead, I decided to prime both the Main Bulkhead parts and the Seat Bulkhead parts.
After the priming session, I started to assemble and rivet both Bulkheads together with my dad.
The Main Bulkhead was easy, because there were only a few parts (but I repeat myself). But even with a few parts you can screw things up.
This is how it looks if you teared of the head from a screw attached in the Main Bulkhead. Somehow I gained restrained, because normally I get into “rage-mode”. It helped that I wasn’t the one breaking it. Typically I tend to over-stress screw and bolts all the time.
There was not enough screw protruding, so loosening it with pliers failed. The solution was to drill a smaller hole in the screw from the other side (platenut).
Using a threadtap we could screw it out again, without damaging the thread in the platenut. WD-40 is your friend.
What I found baffling is that one of the holes, attaching the Front and Aft side of the Main Bulkhead, was too small. We looked at it for some minutes and decided to enlarge it to the correct size.
Once all the nuts are torqued to the right moment, we use torque seal to indicate the nut is torqued and provide a visual indicator if the nut somehow gets loose in the future.
Then the second Bulkhead, starting with the seat back rest. Luckily we could use the squeezer.
What’s really handy is that I constructed drawers in my table, which I can use to “clamp” parts, so they are at a comfortable height to rivet.
Yip there are the dumb-founded faces again! Yet another Homer Simpson moment, Doh!
This time nothing broken, but we forgot to set a rivet in the bottom stiffener before riveting them together. No way we can set them and drilling out the others is not an option. It’s a lot of work, I don’t have enough of these special long rivets and most importantly drilling out rivets does not make it better.
We decided that the rivet is “not crucial” and later I came to the conclusion that I can still use a blind rivet.
I’m not sure why it looks like I have to hand-power squeeze the rivet. It’s probably my facial expression of concentration.
The hinge blocks of the flaps need some precision drilling, so we use the drillpress, to make the holes nice and clean.
Time: 6 Hours, Rivets: 269/0
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