The end of section 29 is in sight! Having completed all the drilling, I continued by permanently attaching the left and right landing gear mounts. All bolt shanks had Boelube applied and went through relatively easily. I also made sure to not forget attaching the aluminum bushings over the bolts between the center section bulkheads, and the mid seat rail supports.
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| Left landing gear mount permanently attached |
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| Center section bulkhead bolts were torqued first, after which the side plate bolts are inserted and torqued. All bolts lay flat against the mounts after torquing. |
After attaching the left landing gear mount, I riveted in the left forward floor panel (except for the flange that lies against the tunnel as I will later need to also rivet in the SDS fuel pump mount using some of those hole locations).
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| Left forward floor panel clecoed in place, and panel first riveted to the lower side channel. I had to pull in the channel a bit to get the holes to line up, but once the clecoes were in, I was able to insert the blind rivets with little effort |
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| Using countersunk blind rivets to attach the bottom of the floor panel to the underlying ribs |
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| Riveting the aft floor panel flange. All rivets went in easily |
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| After setting all the blind rivets I was left with quite a pile of mandrels |
In attaching the left landing gear mount, I had learned a few things about which tools worked best for tightening and torquing down the bolts.
For the earlier temporary mounting, I had ground down several 1/4" drive sockets and used a long narrow ratchet to reach between the center section bulkheads. While this worked to allow tightening of the nuts, it was frustrating to apply the correct torque as the socket would frequently slip off the nut as torque increased. Eventually, the correct torque would be reached, but the nut would suffer several scratches and nicks due to the socket slipping off.
Since then I have purchased a few other (cheap) tools that I found to work better than the ground down sockets, and I'll go over them below.
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| Narrow ratchet set and ground down sockets initially used to torque down the stop nuts prior to drilling the side plate holes |
On the bolt head side of the bolts, I used
- 3/8" ratchets
- a socket extension set (very useful to get around the different parts of the landing gear mounts)
- ratcheting socket wrenches
- ground down 1/2" socket to hold the AN5 bolt
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| Wrenches and socket extensions used on the bolt heads |
On the nut side of the bolt, I used
- washer wrenches to attach washers to the bolts between the center section bulkheads
- a narrow long box wrench to hold the AN3 and AN4 nuts while torquing from the bolt head side as this was easier than torquing from the nut side
- a narrow long box wrench with a digital luggage scale attached to one end to torque down the AN5 bolt from the nut side. Torquing from the bolt head would have been impossible due to limited space
- a brush attached to a long rod to sweep out the inevitable washers and nuts that would fall in between the center section bulkheads
- long empennage bucking bar to push bolts out from in between the lower center section bulkheads (this was useful after drilling the side plate holes)
To set torque on the AN5 bolt using the luggage scale, I calculated the correct torque range in ft-lbs based on the distance between the nut and the scale attachment points, and while pulling on the luggage scale I made sure to pull perpendicular to the wrench in the direction of rotation to get an accurate reading (while adding on the drag torque).
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| Tools used to attach and torque bolts from the nut side |
Finally, to torque all the AN3 and AN4 bolts, I used my trusty CDI torque wrenches. The 0-75 in-lb wrench works well for the AN3 bolts, and the 0-300 in-lb wrench works for the AN4 bolts. These wrenches also have a dial indicating the current and max torque which makes it very easy to creep up on the correct torque setting.
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| Torque wrenches with dials indicating current and max torque reached |
After riveting in the left front floor panel, I continued with attachment of the right landing gear mount. Similar to the left mount, all bolts went in smoothly, and torquing was relatively quick and easy using the tools above.
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| Left landing gear mount fully attached and torqued down (prior to applying torque seal) |
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| Left mount side plate bolts torqued |
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| Left mount bushings and mid seat rail support in place |
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| All nuts securely fastened in between the center section bulkheads (left side) |
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| Right landing gear mount fully attached and torqued down (prior to applying torque seal) |
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| Right mount side plate bolts torqued |
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| Right mount bushings and mid seat rail support in place |
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All nuts securely fastened in between the center section bulkheads (right side)
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| Left side plate bolts attaching the landing gear mount. Thanks to the spacer added for the bottom bolts, there was barely any deformation around the bolt heads upon torquing. |
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| Right side plate bolts attaching the landing gear mount |
I then riveted in the right forward floor panel which went in without issue (other than having to pull in the lower side channel a little to line up the holes).
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| Right forward floor panel |
Next, I riveted in the F-01088 forward fuselage ribs than had been left out earlier to permit installing the floor panels. I bucked most of these rivets using either an offset rivet set or the Boeing flush set. I was able to squeeze a couple that attach to the inner flanges of the F-01002 bulkheads using the pneumatic squeezer.
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| Bucking AN470 rivets to the F-01042 bulkheads using an offset rivet set |
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| Squeezing rivets to the F-01002 bulkheads using a 1" yoke. These would have been awkward to buck without climbing into the cabin area. |
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| F-01088-L rib riveted in place |
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| F-01088-R rib riveted in place. I had applied some tape over openings in the floor panels just in case any rivets fell prior to riveting. The area under the floors is fairly inaccessible, so I'll need to be careful with the possibility of things falling into these spaces as the build progresses. |
Finally I applied torque seal to all the landing gear mount bolts.
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| Right landing gear mount, torque seal applied |
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| Right landing gear mount, torque seal applied to all bolts within center section bulkhead |
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Left landing gear mount, torque seal applied
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Left landing gear mount, torque seal applied to all bolts within center section bulkhead
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With that, I can mark this long section COMPLETE!!!
Time Taken: 11.1 hours
Dates: November 11 2025 - November 17 2025
Fuse Side Skins Total Time: 130.0 hours
RV-10 Build Total Time: 1216.8 hours
Priming Total Time: 142.6 hours (not included in build time totals)
