Forward Floor Coming Together

I guess that's a pretty fitting headline as most of my work today was going into the forward floor of the fuselage. That is after I was happily removing the flaperon from the workbench and moving it to the hanging storage rack.
After that I riveted the pulley bracket to the supporting floor ribs and the stiffener.


After that the same happened to the flaperon mixer assembler. But careful! Part of the assembly is done in section 39 which installs the autopilot servo brackets. This is where to stop.


As the second supporting floor rib for this assembly needs some material removed and some beefy stiffener installed to support the servos torque. Removing the material was easy with the pneumatic nibbler. Cleanup of the cut was done with a hand file with the rib in a vise.


Then the stiffener gets installed, along with some match-drilling and some worries about how close that nutplate is sitting to the #12 hole and how I would get anything passed that. Later I found that the manual has you jump over a step that had you drill out one rivet of the nutplate to pivot it away from the hole, along with other things that were not required. I guess it's an oversight that Van's had you jump completely over this step as removing this one rivet is indeed required.


After catching up with this oversight the rest of the installation was cake. This photo was taken right before I realized that for installing a screw in this hole close to the nutplate I had to get that nutplate out of the way.



Then two additional brackets are attached as well as another rib to the existing assemblies (the one with the pulley bracket and the one with the flaperon mixer). Here's the one with the mixer:


and here's the one with the pulley bracket:


Oh, by the way, on of the brackets I just installed in this step (actually two as there's a pair for each side) has nutplates installed with these dreaded CCR264 rivets and as you cannot dimple the holes Van's has you machine countersink these. But the material is paper thin and not really good for this. In addition there are two holes per bracket located on the outside of the flange where the countersinking cage doesn't have enough surface to rest on to do a good job. I messed up one bracket that way (not bad enough to replace it but not good to my standards). On the other bracket I just used the deburring tool and slowly drove it deep enough to make the rivet sit flush. The result was WAY better than using the CSK cage. I just did this on the outer holes but could have probably done for all the holes on the bracket.

The last task for today was to pull a stack of parts needed for the next steps and started deburring them and getting them ready for prep & prime. Here's the stack of vinyl coated aluminum.