After a several week sabbatical from aircraft work, I managed to spend a day off work continuing the carpet removal and preparation process.

One of the trouble points was to remove the screws which fasten the seat attachment plates to the floor. Several of these screws were stubborn and had to be coerced out…the ones that would not come out, or snapped when I tried to remove them, had to have their nutplates removed – which entailed the rivets holding them drilled out and replaced. Thanks to a lot of help from Dan, this got mostly completed yesterday – there are two plates that need to be riveted in – but we ran out of rivets!

I finished removing all of the carpet and glue residue from the back seat area. Then a thorough vacuum and wipe down to clean out the area. Then some aluminum metal prep was used to lightly etch the surface, followed by spray painting the area with Sherwin-Williams 988 self-etching primer. The middle section, which is still painted in the green/yellow zinc chromate, covers the control cables.

I then spent a considerable amount of time on the front two footwells. These were harder to work on due to the rudder pedals and the flap lever getting in the way. I ran out of time to get the area masked off ready to spray paint with the primer – so that will be on the to-do list for the next time.

I did get some of the interior plastic painted black. The red items on the left are the original color, the ones on the left are freshly painted with black paint. For this I used Krylon Fusion spray paint that is designed for plastic applications. http://krylon.com/products/fusion_for_plastic/ This was procured at the famous aircraft supply store – a.k.a. Walmart!

 

Here is one of the ceiling plastic panels. The left is before, and the right is after 3 coats of the Krylon paint.

The latest update on the engine is that is shipping on June 24th, and I should expect it in the maintenance shop on Tuesday 29th June. Time to get my skates on to complete the carpet installation.