I did the initial trimming of the edges of both doors with the Dremel:
Trimming off outside door edges
All door edges trimmed off
Then started the real journey of fitting the doors - I started by making small notches with the Dremel, slowly making them deeper until I reached inner surface of the cabin cover all around the door:
Notches around door to find proper trimming depth
Door in place after initial trimming
After this I trimmed off the index hole "flaps", and now I have a TON more sanding/trimming ahead to get the doors to actually fit in the cabin cover. Sand, try it on, still doesn't fit, take it off, rinse, repeat - that's my life now :)
In the meantime, I also 3D printed the door strut placeholder, which will be used for drilling the gas strut attach brackets into the door:
3D printed gas struct placeholder next to the actual gas strut
With the baggage floors riveted on, I moved to the next section, riveted the door hinge frame, and attached the door (using the split pin mod that others have also used):
Baggage door installed in place
Door attach pin, split in the middle and folded into the door
Baggage door strike plate
Door seal applied around the door borders
The only thing left on this section is to attach the left baggage cover, which I'll do later along with the section 35 panels.
Along with installing the baggage floors, I also installed the rear seat floors. I started by painting the seat belt attachment points, which I hadn't before for some reason:
Painting the protruding rear seat belt attachment points
Then protecting the conduit hole so the conduits don't get damaged by the edges:
Grommet edging to protect the rear seat floor conduit hole
And finally, actually riveting the floors, which was kind of annoying to do without getting inside the plane (which I'm avoiding since it's still on sawhorses):
Riveting the rear seat floors
Riveted rear seat floors
The mid seat rail support doesn't really have attachment instructions (an omission in the manual), but since this section calls for installing the seat floors over them, I also installed them at this time - they were a royal pain to get bolted down and torqued, and required 3 hands and a lot of contortionism:
Mid seat rail installed in place
I'm starting to look at my interior options so I can work on the other cover panels.
I continued to make slow progress on the various fairings - I got the rudder top fairing ready to rivet:
Rudder top fairing match-drilled and clecoed in place
Backing strip attached to rudder top fairing
For smoothing the face of the elevator fairing and filling the pinhole, a nice layer of resin with cab-o-sil was used, followed by patiently sanding down to 2000 grit:
Elevator fairing with tons of pinholes to fill!
Elevator fairing after filling pinholes
We glued foam to the horizontal stabilizer fairings, and proceeded to mold it to be slightly concave to preserve the gap from the elevator fairings. The vertical stabilizer fairing didn't need that and was just flat:
HS fairing with foam plug glued in place
Sanding foam to fit the HS fairing
Concave-sanded foam plug for the horizontal stabilizer fairing
VS foam plus, which was mostly flat
Adding a layer of fiber to it was easy, but removing the foam afterwards took a bit of work, first cutting chunks off, then sanding, then cleaning up the remaining bits with acetone:
Layer of fiber applied to the HS fairings, following the shape of the foam
Removing bits of foam from the HS fairings
Remaining little bits of foam on the layer of fiber
Layer of fiber after cleaning with acetone
I last-minute decided that I wanted to use screws to attach the vertical stabilizer fairing (since I'm running conduit up there, may as well make it easy to install something - be it a camera or a NAV antenna if the Bob Archer one doesn't work well), so I added those, but of course overlooked the fact that I didn't have any K2000-06 nutplates for the last hole, so that'll get finished and glued on later:
Vertical stabilizer fairing backing strip with nutplates for attaching with screws
I then added the two layers of fiber to the inside of each of those fairings. Working in that tight space was not the easiest and getting the fiber to not fold on itself required some contortion, but it worked out well:
Tip fairings atop fiber layers to be added to their inside
Tip fairings after adding the inside layers
Next will be finishing the outside face of those layers, attaching them to the stabilizers, then smoothing the joint so there's no gap. After the above steps I'm also able to detach the HS and elevators, and finish drilling/tapping the holes underneath it.
We finally joined all the door shells, which was actually pretty easy:
Adding resin to the Parabeam fiber between the door shells
Door shells clamped into place to give their final shape
There were a few mistakes on the first door - for one, I forgot to cover the pin block holes with some tape, so a lot of resin leaked out of them and had to be cleaned up:
Resin that oozed out of the pin block holes
Pin block holes after sanding out the excess resin
Pin block holes on left door, covered with tape this time
Also, the reinforcement blocks weren't really attached to the outer shell, so we used a chip chaser to push resin into that small gap, and that actually turned out well (minus having to carefully clean the chip chaser with acetone afterwards, of course).
Reinforcement blocks not attached to the outer shell
Reinforcement blocks after adding resin and sanding
I also started turning the door into swiss cheese by drilling the holes for the Aerosport low-profile handle, and making sure the parts fit properly:
Holes match-drilled for installing the Aerosport low-profile handle
Test-fitting the exterior Aerosport parts
Test-fitting the interior Aerosport parts
Since on the first door it was clear that the thinner layer of resin hadn't been enough to attach that latch recess to the outer shell, on the second door we added a thicker layer with cab-o-sil (just like on the edges of the door). I then filled the gaps in the first door with resin using a curved-tip syringe, which made a decent mess, but one that was easy to clean up:
Gap between the latch recess and the outer shell
Puddle of resin after filling the gaps between shells
Finally, I countersunk the flush screw holes:
Next will be the long task of trimming the door edges until they fit perfectly.
