DATE: 01-20-2025 – TIME: 2:30 – 3:00 ~ 0:30
Page SD75-FF-08 of the drawings is the assembly of rudder and brakes sub-assembly back into the cabin and riveting and bolting as necessary.
The IPL sheet FF-08 starts with bolting the lower bearing support, C75F12-5, with AN3-6A bolts to the cabin floor and stiffener channel with the lower bearing support inside the channel, underneath the cabin floor. These 4 holes have to be drilled to size with a #12 drill bit and do not include the 4 holes in a line across the front. Those 4 are drilled once the firewall is in place. As is my practice, we put washers under the head of the bolt in addition to under the nut in almost all circumstances.
You can see in the pictures that we had already riveted the slave brake cylinder supports in place and that even though the FF-08 diagram shows the rudder pedals in place we decided to leave them out until the firewall was in place. This because of the drilling required to set the firewall properly, including the installation of the lower engine mounting brackets.
A couple of other things to note are that we had not installed the rear seat channel, nor the seat tops at this stage even though they channel is shown on the FF-06 drawing as being in place.
Sometimes this is just confusion due to the IPL “instructions” not being clear, or not specifying the rivets to be used, or uncertainty as to weather more than one part needs to be riveted together. In this case I believe it was because there is no mention of actually installing the rear seat channel on the IPL FF-06 form. In any event it won’t be difficult to add it later on.
At this point we were also pretty close to running out of A5 rivets but had probably 2,700 or so A4 rivets left with almost nowhere to put them so I think the pick sheets are just wrong for the fuselage and controls kits. I had already ordered 200 more online because I had drilled about 50 or so out but after counting I figured I was still about 500 short so Roger at Zenith is shipping another 500 free. I will track how many I use and let him know to adjust the shipping quantity.
Next comes Page SD75-FF-09 which is the attachment of the firewall to the cabin floor.