Seat Tunnel & Priming

The next step after temporarily mounting the seat pans was to fit the parts for the front tunnel cover.  This is made up of two Z brackets with a ton of odd angles cut into them, and a thin plate that rivets to the top of them.  It all gets attached to the seat pans with screws.  Instead of trying to lay out all of the holes with it in place, I decided to just locate a couple of them for reference and then drill the rest with the parts out of the plane.

Yesterday I had glued down a couple of cable tie mounts that will help hold the conduit in place under the seat pans.  The glue seems to be holding just fine, so I zip tied the conduit to the mounts.  With that done, there's nothing keeping me from permanently attaching the aft seat pans.

The seat pans get attached with pop rivets since there is no way to easily access the back side for regular solid rivets.  It was a pretty easy process, other than the back ache from bending over the side of the plane and reaching inside for an hour.  I see why some people have gone the route of building a rotisserie to attach the fuselage to.  Being able to rotate it would definitely make access a lot easier.

The front section of the tunnel has a bunch of parts that attach with screws, so after a brief rest for my back, I went back in to attach all of the nuplates.

I had my fingers crossed that we might get a little sun to kick the temps into the 60's, but no luck.  I've ordered more of the EkoPrime, but for now all I have left is the epoxy primer.  Unfortunately, it is a lot harder to spray in cold weather (supposed to be at least 70 degrees for that).  Most of the parts I have to prime are removable, like the seats, baggage panels, and the rear baggage bulkhead.  I still need to assemble things like the seat backs and the front tunnel cover, and I don't want primer to hold up progress.  So while it looks like a 2 year old did it, I took a paint brush and dipped it into my little touch up container of EkoPrime and just brushed primer on all of the mating surfaces.  Since the EkoPrime dries reasonably well in the colder temps, I will at least be able to assemble everything and move on.  Once I have some warmer weather next spring, I can prime all of the parts as full assemblies.  The reality is these don't need primer for corrosion control, given they're all non-structural parts that won't be exposed to the elements.  Most of these particular pieces will be visible to some degree though (or will get wear and tear), so I will be painting them and will need the primer for that anyway.