6 Nov 04 - Drilling Seat Parts

Today we match drilled the parts that we've fabricated recently to F-705. That really was about it . . . hopefully tomorrow we can get everything deburred, primed, and riveted on.

Picture for the FAA: yup, that's me.	F-705 spacer match drilled.	Both of 'em match drilled.
This was an interesting delimma - both of these needed to be drilled but doing them at the same time seemed risky - the inner one might not stay where you wanted it to. What we did was to drill a few holes in the spacer, and then take the spacer off. We matched drilled that to the larger top piece (while it was off the plane, so we could make sure it lined up properly), and then we could cleco the whole schmew to F-705 and match drill the rest. This worked well. The other thing that you're about to see is match drilling the L-bracket to the back of F-705. There's supposed to be a 1/8 space between the top of F-705 and the bottom of the L-bracket. Great. How do you measure that? We were befuddled until it occured to someone to put another piece of 1/8 L-bracket between the two pieces. This works great.
This is pretty much what I just described.	Another view of the same thing.	Test fit of the parts so far. It fits. Yay!
Seat back braces. Unrelated to everything else we did today, but more notes about this below.

Be sure to cut these the right length - if you mess up and cut one an inch short, there's not enough to try to make another one. There's only a few inches of leftover, as these are (I'm pretty sure) the only pieces that you make from this size of aluminum angle.

Yeah, ask me how I know this. You guessed it. Time to get a replacement angle, but because this isn't really a structural airplane part, the replacement aluminum angle came from Home Depot. Note that this would be a really bad idea if we were working on (for example) something that held the wings on. Don't do that, and don't you dare tell anyone that I told you that you could. Thank you. For the seats, though, it seems less vital. We'll be sure to put that piece on the copilot's side, so in the extremely unlikely event that it breaks, it won't have any ill effects except not being able to carry passengers.

Interesting to note, though. The stuff from Home Depot looks almost identical, except that the inside corner of the L isn't rounded as much as it is on the Van's parts.

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