Seat Assemblies RIveted to Center Section

I started by clecoing the two finished seat assemblies to the center section, starting with the upper flange as this was what I had easy access to.


Then it dawned to me that it will get a little tricky to get to the bottom of this. Partly because the seat assemblies are all wobbly with just the upper flange being connected to a solid structure and partly because this thing now became pretty bulky as well as heavy and not easy to turn over just like that.
I thought it to be the safest way to first turn it on its side, stabilize it there and put some clecos in the bottom flanges before turning it over completely for riveting.


That was a pretty good idea except that the structure wouldn't stay on its side by itself. A box with 500 230 grains bullets placed on the side flange of the wing bolt thingy fixed this issue.
I put the bottom clecos in and turned this monster upside down. to rivet the bottom holes. I remembered a discussion on the forum that was talking about how to correctly rivet the rear floor ribs to the center section and the important part was to put the manufactured head on the center section, inside the landing gear tunnel to allow for enough space to later insert the landing gear into this tunnel. As it didn't appear to much more convenient to do the forward flanges any different, I just riveted all of them from the tunnel again, using the PRP26A close quarter riveter. Yes, all those rivets were pulled manually. I sure feel like Popeye now!


Considering how awkward the access to the forward rib flanges would have been (using the wedge tool on every single hole), I think I didn't lose too much time going manual here. Pretty quickly the job was done and I could turn the structure over again to rivet the top flanges.


The top went very fast. Except for the outer 4 holes using CS4-4 rivets there was nothing to look out for and so it soon looked like this.


For the last step you have to look closely as the difference is hard to spot. I put the bracket on the inboard sides of the wing bolt assemblies and marked the bolt on the bottom that holds the plastic rollers with torque seal.


That ended the day for today and took me just two hours of shop time. Not bad. I'm just at 50 hours into the section 21 now.