Fuselage Riveting

Today I kicked it old school, just me, a rivet gun and some rocking tunes on my 3rd gen iPod (not that you can hear them over the compressor).

A few entries ago I showed that it is impossible to get the rivet gun into the control tube area to rivet the armrest to the seat base. I don’t know how anyone has done this but I do know I cannot. So to get around this I made a couple of l-angles and riveted them between the two areas so that I could still enjoy the stiffening that riveting would give (and not least more stability for the seat belt). Yes, innuendo intended.

Here’s the passenger side

Seat base arm rest l-angle

and here’s the pilot side

Seat base arm rest l-angle

The pilot side one is a lot shorter because I was able to do quite a few of the rivets for that side (since the passenger side wasn’t in the way).

Both fuel tanks have now had at least a fortnight with 12 gallons of juice sitting in them with no leaks. So I decided that meant I could close up the channel through which the fuel lines and electrical wires run. Taking care not to run drill bits through anything important, I soon had the channel ready to rivet

About to rivet the channel cover

(of course when I say ‘soon’, I’m talking airplane building units of time)

And eventually I had the covers riveted inside the plane

Everything riveted

and on the outside of the plane

Everything riveted

I want to say that now every rivet on the fuselage has been pulled except there is still the windows to do. Wait, what’s that? What about the arm rest and control cover? I did those too….

Control cover riveted

Arm rest riveted

Lastly, I wanted to put some white vinyl in the baggage area. It is pretty hard to get access to the back, have to work through the window holes so I had to cut the piece into two halves and do them separately.

Baggage area vinyl

I just don’t understand how this vinyl works, it was the same piece cut into two. Allen thinks that perhaps one is upside down which is why the colour looks different, but it is just white?? I give up, and if wasn’t so hard to get at I’d do it again but I’ll live with it. Matches the outside at least.