TIME TO INSTALL THE BAGGAGE FLOORS
Now that the conduit and battery cable runs are in, it is time to make the baggage floors permanent. This is indeed a bit daunting to know that I am sealing this area up for good. There are plenty of builders who elect to place a belly antenna in this area, but I have determined that I will not. My antennae will go elsewhere. Given that determination, it is time to pull a serious amount of rivets. I highly recommend a hydraulic rivet puller for this job. I got mine at Harbor Freight and here is a link to the exact tool I used.
Once you set the nutplates, it is pretty straightforward from there. I had to ream a few holes, but otherwise it was, squeeze, and move on. This ended up being a pretty quick process, but I cannot imagine it by hand. Good for you if you can. Since this went so well, I quickly moved on the floor pans in rear seating area. This… was not so fun.
REAR SEAT FLOOR PANS
My fuselage is a quick build, but this applies to any fuselage as the process is the same. The rear seating area floor pans are such a tight fit that it is a major headache to remove them. I ended up using screwdrivers as leverage, pliers, plenty of towels to avoid damaging the aluminum, and LOTS of colorful language. That’s how the plane knows you mean it.
You can see above that I ended up getting a small kink in the aft edge of this floor pan. It wasn’t a big deal, I was able to use a seamer to get it to lay back out flat. Honestly, I cannot think of a way to get this out without some form of minor damage. It truly is that tight. Once repaired, deburred, and the area under the pan was cleaned out, it was time to reinstall, align, and rivet in place. It took a ton of clecos to get this thing to seat correctly again.
In keeping with the tradition of being an enormous pain, the rivets on the sides and aft lip were also excruciating to install. These are not pull rivets but called out as AN rivets. Cool. If you have impossibly small hands you can skip my complaining. Otherwise, jam your paws down a 2″ wide gap with a bucking bar, grimace, and pull the trigger on your rivet gun. I’ll admit I completely ran out of space and ended up using pull rivets on the forward 4 holes of the pan along the centerline.
You can see above that everything forward of the seatbelt anchor is a pull rivet. No big deal. While I loved yelling and complaining about all of this, it ended up looking pretty good. I’m happy I slowed down and continued to build at the same pace and quality that this plane demands.