One of those days

Some days I have the Midas touch. Some days I don't. And some days, well, I suppose the opposite of Midas would be the merde touch. It's French - Google it. Today wasn't quite that bad. I think I'm going to go with the petit merde touch.

It started early. I arrived at the paying job at my normal 0615 and settled in at my desk after a brief stint brewing the coffee and yelling at the newspaper. I had left a job nearly done yesterday afternoon and put the finishing touches on it this morning. It's a clever piece of code that goes into the database and retrieves an entire hierarchy of data. In other (equally opaque) words, it retrieves a top, root object, then retrieves the children of that object. As it retrieves each child, it also retrieves their children. If you were to draw out the relationships, it would look like an org chart or family tree. The benefit of getting everything all at once is that I can get at the entire family, if you will, after just one operation against the database. Efficiencies are gained by doing so.

Well, efficiencies are gained by doing so if (and only if) it actually works.  It didn't. Instead of returning my happy family of data, the program crashed with a stack overflow. What that means in a nutshell is that my computer ran out of memory. With the kind of memory computers have these days, though, that would have had to have been one very, very large family. No, it meant that something was horribly wrong in my code.

It came down to a problem with cousins, to drag the familial analogy along even further. After quite a bit of hair pulling and desk pounding, I realized what was happening. When I was creating one of the children, I had it also create its own children. As long as I was doing that, I thought I'd be clever and have it create a somewhat unrelated relative that I thought might come in handy later. You know, as a kidney donor or something. I'll call that new relative a nephew - it's nicer than "parts bank."

The problem was that the nephew was never intended to be included in the family, so as part of his creation he had to find out who his uncle was to maintain at least some semblance of association. So, when the uncle created him, he in turn tried to create an uncle for himself. That uncle tried to create another nephew, who also tried to create an uncle, who tried to create a nephew.....  On and on and on, until there's no memory left to hold it all. Stack overflow, scream of frustration, pound the desk. You know it's bad when coffee is the calming influence on your morning.

I doubt if that made much sense, so suffice it to say, it was all quite frustrating.

Once I figured out what the problem was, it was easy to fix. I neutered the uncle. Serves him right.

Unsurprisingly, my work on the airplane tonight ended in frustration. Not the screaming, desk pounding kind. More of an "Oh well, it's just been that kind of day. It will look fine tomorrow."

It was to be a light night. All I had left to do in the seemingly interminable Section 21 was to rivet on the very last bulkhead. It took four nutplates and 16 rivets, plus a detour into the second of the two autopilot brackets, but it was pretty easy.

Being as this is pretty close to the end of this section, I kind of took an audit of completeness, as it were, basically just trying to see if I had missed anything. Here's a bit of a mystery:

It's passingly odd that there are no bushings in those holes. I went back through the plans and could find no steps instructing that bushings be installed there, so there it is. A mystery.

The second to last step is the installation of a bracket that will support the fuel flow sensor for the Dynon D-180. This sensor will measure the flow of fuel (hence the diabolically clever name) through the fuel lines, allowing the Dynon to display the rate at which it is being burned by the engine. Useful, that.

The bracket goes down in the tunnel between the seats.

It's kind of hard to get at down there, which is unfortunate since it has to be match drilled to the belly skin. The long #30 bit is required.

Once drilled, the bracket had to be removed for the installation of (what else?) two nutplates. That done, I clecoed it back into place and prepared to rivet it in. Looking down into the tunnel and thinking about how hard it was going to get to get the rivet puller down there was a little depressing. Frankly, it was a battle that I did not want to fight. Suddenly it dawned on me that not only would I not need to fight that battle, it would have been foolish to do so. Who wants the wart looking pulled end of a blind rivet hanging out of their belly skin?? No one, that's who! Not even when it's airplane skin we're talking about and not their own skin! 

The right thing to do would be to install the rivets up through the belly skin. There's no easier time to choose do the right thing than those rare occasions when the right thing is also the easy thing.

Well, if not easy, at least easier.

So, last step. Looks easy: install six panhead screws up through the belly skin to act as attachment posts for some device to come later. Six screws, six metal locknuts. Nothing to it, right?

You know what they say are the three most important aspects of real estate are, right? Location, location, and location. These screws are not in good locations. Not.At.All.

After futilely struggling with the first one for twenty minutes, a thought struck me: this is the easiest one.

I uttered a sharp, non-petit "Merde!" and called it quits for the night.

Chapter three. Again.

While it has not (and hopefully will not) reached the level of mundanity, I do have to say that some of this work is hitting the upper boundary of "routine." Cleco-dimple-rivet.  Cleco-dimple-rivet. Cleco-dimple-rivet. Repeat until, well, you just don't want to do it anymore. It's not that it's boring per se, it's more that there are certain things that have become very commonplace. It's sort of like re-reading chapter three after finishing chapter ten of a novel. The again after chapter twelve. And fifteen. It starts to feel repetitive. But even at its worst, it still feels like progress and offers the sense of satisfaction inherent in using your hands to mold a complex object out of tiny little parts. So there is that.

With that enthralling lead-in, I'm sure you're right on the edge of your seats with anticipation and can hardly wait to see what I got done tonight. You're right to be excited: I riveted in two new floor boards. And they had nutplates! Be calm by beating heart!

As is often the case, the beginning of all of this was the replacement of some stuff that had been put in position, removed, and needed to be put back again. In this case it was the re-primed step braces that needed to be clecoed back onto the step ribs and riveted in.

I started out by riveting from the rib through the bracket but soon learned that this caused issues in the lower outside corner when the rivet puller wouldn't fit in. I shifted to putting the rivets through the brackets and into the ribs and it all went much better.

The bulkhead gets riveted on next. Looking at the plans, I could see that I'd have to be careful about what got riveted when. It would be easy to get carried away with riveting the bulkhead not only onto the end flanges of the step ribs but through the step support brackets as well. That would be a mistake because the little aluminum brackets that host the nutplates would then have no open rivet holes available to them. 

There are also a couple of holes that get a CS4-4 flush blind rivet rather than the normal LP4-3. I went ahead and did those first so that I wouldn't forget.

There are a couple of holes on each side that don't get riveted. I marked those with no-no clecos. I threw caution to the wind in order to put an adrenalin-inducing risk into the game by not covering the no-no rivets with duct tape. Truth is, I'm getting low on tape.

The corners get riveted next.

Finally, the floors get riveted in.

And there it is!

What? I promised you nutplates? Oh, yeah. These were a real treat. See those lightening holes in the ribs down in the gap between the two floor boards? You have to reach through them with a nutplate to install on the corner of each floor board. I don't know if you can get a sense of scale from these pictures, but even with my tiny arms (arms so spindly that an anorexic super model would find them too frail) I couldn't get more than two fingers through. I had to hold the nutplate between my index finger and my driving finger while trying to get the nutplate pressed up against the bottom of a floor board, then try to slide it into position hoping hoping hoping that I would drop it. Dropping one would cause a real dilemma: try to find a way to get it out of there without drilling out all of the rivets holding the floor board in place, or just live with the rattle.

I managed to get both installed without putting myself in the position of having to make that decision.

See? This wasn't boring after all!