Seven hours to get the rest of the left side nut plates in and the floors attached. While I was at it I also put a couple of 4-5 rivets on the outboard seat rib. Those had been missing ever since I built that part and attached the rib to the bulkhead. I'm not sure why I left them out, but I did. I also added four additional nut plates to the lower edge of the aft baggage side wall. This particular side wall will be blind riveted to the fuselage, but in order to get the floors up, I needed to add some nut plates at the bottom,
I mentioned a couple of entries ago that the access to the side ribs is really lousy with the skins on. This factored into some of the time I spent trying to attach the nut plates as I used about every method I could think of to get rivets in there. Hand squeezer? Too tall to fit below the arm rest. Pneumatic squeezer? Too big to get in close. Rivet gun? No easy way to get the set on the rivet. I finally gave up and set one rivet per side on three of them--at some point I'll go back and add blind rivets to the other side just to hold them in place. For now it is done enough.
One other thing I found. The nut plates just grip too well and I actually broke a screw off trying to attach the floor. Since these nut plates are not structural, and since I'm not worried about the screws vibrating out, I decided to run a tap through each one to make attaching the screws easier. Although it took awhile, it turned out to be the best course of action and all of the screws went in quickly.
