Steps complete
I spent two or three full days working on the steps on each side of the fuselage. These were certainly a design after thought. I don’t have a whole lot to say about the step fitting process except for that it wasn’t very enjoyable and I’m glad they are totally done. Don’t get me wrong, there was no “rocket science” involved and nothing particularly difficult about it. I did deviate from the instructions and added a .040″ doubler plate on the back side just to add some more metal to the setup. I’m curious if anybody has ever over stressed (bent / broken) the step attachment? I haven’t heard of any such issues. Whatever, I wanted more metal than just the side skin to hold these on. I obviously primed the steel step inside and out, as well as all of the aluminum surfaces, before assembly. Some might additionally set the rivets “wet” (dipped in primer), I didn’t. I think corrosion and failure will be easy to detect here.
Moving on to the rear baggage wall. This is a two piece thing. The only pre-punched holes are in the bottom edge of the bottom piece. So, you line up the bottom holes (I used dummy #8 screws) and drill in assembly the rest of the screw holes up the sides. Once I got the bottom section drilled, I put a #8 screw and nut in a couple of the upper holes to hold things in place. The top section starts out as a rectangular piece that must be trimmed to shape. One thing of interest is a little downward bend, only a few degrees, on one long edge. There is no mention of this in the instructions or plans. I assumed that this is kind of like edge rolling an overlapping skin, and hence, belonged at the bottom straight edge. So I marked and trimmed the curved edge of the upper section (pneumatic sheet metal shears for the flat sections, die grinder with a cutoff wheel for the rest, cleaned up on the belt sander). Once it is cut to shape, all of the attachment holes and seat belt anchor pass throughs must me measured, marked, and drilled. Then I taped the upper section to the bulkhead in alignment for drilling to the bulkhead. This worked very well. The upper holes were drilled, first to #30 so clecos could be used to hold things together, then opened up to #19.
With the baggage walls drilled, I took everything apart for deburring. I also removed the aft top skins. I deburred all of the skin and baggage wall holes that had been drilled. I also used a nutplate jig to drill all of the attachment holes for the nutplates on the baggage wall bulkhead and deburred those. I then did some small final prep on the baggage floors. I’m getting very close to putting down the baggage floors for good. The only thing left is to install the sound-proofing material that I’m going to put on the bottom skin.
