Fuselage Turned Upside Down

Tonight I riveted the seat skins on and put the control column in the heart of the fuselage, torqued the screws and torque sealed them. After reading Dave's blog I had prepared myself for doing nothing but this as fiddling with the washers and the bolts of the control column was about to take significant time. Surprisingly, securing every bolt took me about 5 minutes each and I didn't even have to use tape as an aid. The AN960-10 washers (I did not have to use any 10L for proper fit) fit perfectly and snugged right under the steel arms. With the help of some fine tweezers this was accomplished without too much hassle and I only dropped a pair of washers once.
Here are the seat skins in place.


Then the first bolt was successfully secured.


Shortly thereafter the second bolt was in and all that was left to do was to torque the bolts which took actually longer than fiddling with the washers because I didn't have the right extension piece to conveniently get to the bolt head.


This surprisingly short task made it possible to get further forward with the build that I hadn't expected to do tonight. So, I thought I throw in one of those rare photos of the builder setting some rivets ...


Oh, and please politely ignore the mess in the background. It is actually very organized but might appear a bit confusing to the untrained eye ...
So after more extensive use of the Avery wedge tool I had those 1212 ribs riveted to the seat bulkhead.


This included dimpling some specific holes, too. Please note that my dimple dies had a hard time on dimpling the upper flange on the inner two ribs in this photo. The flange is so short that the die doesn't have enough room and it bent the flange a bit outwards. I was able to correct that by bending it back with my hand though.
The next step was to just CLECO the next and possibly last bulkhead to these ribs. I believe that the next "bulkhead in front of this one is going to be the firewall. Now, the structure had to be turned over upside down to allow easy access to some of the holes that require to get some snap bushings.


At this point I received a friendly call from my beloved wife who had dinner ready and so I quickly cleaned up and called it a night.....

.... to eat this:


Yummy! What a treat after a successful night in the shop!