Baggage Floors and Ribs Riveted

What a great evening in the shop! I picked up the ends where I had left them yesterday and that was in confusion about how to rivet the baggage floors to the center section. After reading the forum about this problem it appeared that I should be able to bend the floors back a bit and work with the pneumatic squeezer as that one needs only a margin more room than the hand tool.
And so I did! It takes a little bit of trial, a calm hand and patience but it is doable. I used the cupped die as well - at least for almost all the rivets. To be precise the two in the corners on each side (so 4 all in all) needed the double flat die as there was no way to get the cupped die centered with a 3" yoke. I was amazed how nice the rivets looked that I had squeezed with the flat dies. You can hardly tell that I did not use the cupped one on them! After 45 minutes including learning curve, I was done with this job.


On to the next job. This one was widely hated on the forum but I didn't think it was that bad - or am I just getting used to this kind of stuff?
The manual asked for riveting the baggage floor ribs to the center section with LP4-3 rivets but to install the manufactured head on the bulkhead which therefore requires to pull the rivets from inside the tunnel where the landing gear will later be installed.


The space in there is so restricted that a shop head protruding into this area would prevent us from later getting the landing gear in there. Using the tight spaces riveter that Van's suggested showed that incredible level of engineering Van's did. I seriously have no idea how anyone could get those rivets pulled in there without this tool.
As all the rivets had to be pulled by hand, it took a moment or two until it was done, but nothing too complicated. The difficult rivets were the ones deep down close to the horizontal support of the center section (the thing that looks like the bottom in the tunnel). For those you need the wedge tool or the little Avery tool that was recently talked about in the forum. I don't like the little wedges and got me the Avery tool and I love it! See it in action on one of those tricky rivets:


After finishing the tunnel action, The ribs had to get riveted to the baggage floors. That's quite easy once you figured out from the manual which rivets to use in which holes. A few clecos were enough for holding the floors in place.


And as all these rivets now were pull rivets and easy to get at, a few moments later the floors were riveted to the ribs.
Enough for one evening!



Tomorrow I'll be installing the nutplates on the floors and see what else there is to do. That's after I met Denny Myrick and his RV-12 at KAVQ for lunch. What a life!