I’ve spent the last few days finishing off items on my list that I accumulated while inspecting the Quickbuild Fuselage.
One of those items was to finish riveting the forward floor boards. I had once considered spraying some insulation under the floor boards for sound proofing, but after doing some research on VAF, I’ve decided against putting any insulation there. It’s best practice to keep all insulating material several inches back from the firewall so it doesn’t get hot and burn/smoke/out gas in the event of a fire. There’s just no guarantee that I could achieve that by spraying.
The other main item I finished up was permanently attaching the steps. Most of the items in this section were already done as part of the quickbuild, all I had to do was slide the steps in and bolt them in position. One minor tweak that I did was to install bushings inside of the step tube right at the bolt hole. There have been complaints over time that the steps become loose/wiggly. The idea here is that the bolt doesn’t really have much to tighten against as it’s basically just going through the center of a hollow tube and crushes it (makes it oval instead of round) when tightening. So TCW Technologies came up with these perfectly sized bushings to insert into the step tube and give the tube some rigidity right at the bolt hole.
Here’s a picture of the bushings:
Here are the installed steps:
adamsrv10 