Turns out I can’t (duh). I screwed up by placing an angle I drilled to the wrong side of the seat back and used it as a drill guide. Nice hole, wrong place. However most of the time I’m a lucky bastard. Just by shear coincidence, Van’s accidentally shipped three seat backs. So the only part I fubarred, is the one that they shipped in excess. What are the odds on that?

Ok, warned by this screw-up, we finished the rest of the seat without a hitch.

The side rails of the seat, lay over the piano hinge at the bottom. This can only work if you file a small ridge of the side rails enough to cover the piano hinge.

Last part is drilling the piano hinges of the seat adjuster.
Moving on to the Flaps or the actuator to be more precise.

I choose the electrical flap actuator, although I think it’s not possible to build a manual flap actuator in an RV. At least I never seen one.

The Flap actuator is housed between the seats and its a motor that drives the Flaps rod. We are fitting the Flap actuator side skins to the back plate. The forward side is pre-drilled.

After match drilling, it is now time to install the motor. Again follow the manual, because although it looks trivial, the correct order in doing stuff delivers a better fit (trust me, because I didn’t).

Next day I installed the actual flap actuation rod. It has three hinge brackets. Especially the middle one, on which I’m working here, is tricky to install.

With all the parts match drilled, again the boring deburring, scuffing and degreasing process prior to priming follows.

Because (to me) there is a considerable overhead in priming, I batch the different parts into a single priming session. In this case I prepare the Seats, Forward Cabin and the Flap actuator.

Almost nearing the end of the Fuselage kit material. in two months my Finish kit will arrive, so I hope I don’t have too much downtime.

Time: 5 Hours, Rivets: 0/0 (2020-01-29)

Time: 2 Hours, Rivets: 0/0 (2020-02-01)

Time: 4 Hours, Rivets: 0/0 (2020-02-02)

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The Static port is a disc with a half inch in diameter protruding nozzle. After some consideration, we decided to attach it with three rivets.

The Static ports are placed in the tail part on both the left and right side. It took a while to make the hole, which consisted mostly of time hesitating to drill. If you screw this up, you’re in dire straits. We installed the tubing in such a way that in case that moisture in the port cannot go into the tube going forward.

The Seat floor has three piano hinges, which determine the preset attach points for the Seat back. I created them earlier and now we will start building the Seat backs.

We check with the Piano hinge clamped to the Seat back if it fits correctly to the Seat bottom (floor).

We can now check the Seat floor and Seat back placed within the Fuselage. The Seat bracket lined-up nicely with the Seat bulkhead.

Now we can start with assembling the Seat (back). The Aluminum of the Seat is thin and without stiffeners bends very easily. There are ridges in the Seat back that give it horizontal strength. Vertically strength is provided by two sturdy Aluminum side angles.

The top and bottom are also strengthened by Aluminum angles, however they are less thick than the side angles.

The fuselage is now resting on my old computer-table with some foam under the main bulkhead.

Time: 4 Hours, Rivets: 6/0 (2020-01-19)

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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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On the bottom side of the Bulkhead is quite a massive stiffener rod, that will probably attach the aft part of the Wings. Also the Flap control rod hinges are attached here.

There are no pre-drilled holes is the stiffeners, so extra care must be taken to align the parts.

The seat belt (harness) attach brackets are also connected to the stiffener. These brackets are powder-coated steel and require some trimming to prevent them from interfering with some bottom ribs.
The backrest of the seats are “adjustable”, however I didn’t understand the options so I made the backrest holder too small.

I figured that out when I flow with Erik in his RV-7 to the AOPA/NVAV Fly-In in Seppe. I solved it by trimming the holder just a little bit. It will probably give me some headache in the future when I’m installing the seats. However I was planning to do something completely different with the seats anyway, so no worries there.

The Rudder cables are going through the Bulkheads via a considerable big hole with a bushing. The pre-drilled (tool-hole) is too small to directly use the Unibit. I use the 1/4 inch drill enlarge the hole and then use the Unibit.

I also drilled some extra holes for electrical wiring. As an aside, using an electric drill with a quick release system is great. I just hold the quick release and press the button, so the machine unlocks the drill. Works great for “normal” drills, not so much for Unibits. The Unibit still turns a few rounds, just enough to scrape some skin from your hand. Somehow I only stop bad practices after heavy bleeding. Every time I just nick-it, it doesn’t work as a warning. Well this time it did.
Unfortunately these “teachings” wear off after some time and I repeat the same mistake.
Apparently my drive for efficiency conquers the pain of injury (or I’m just a lazy asshole).

Aha the high note to plane building: deburring. Not only boring, but also brutal for the hands and bad for the back. Although the stool helps a lot.

Time: 4 Hours, Rivets: 0/0 (2019-06-23)

Time: 4 Hours, Rivets: 0/0 (2019-06-26)

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