You’re taking a passenger in that thing??
With the fuselage “together”, I could now focus on the most important thing – making something I could sit in and make aeroplane noises!
The front and rear seats are integral pieces of the fuselage and form transverse stiffening bulkheads which help the fuselage stay square. The rear seat back was attached previously whilst attaching the fuselage sides together. For the pilot’s seat, the bottom section has a vertical plywood gusset which the control linkage passes through. I thought it would be a great idea to put this in first – whilst it did work, it’s not something I would recommend.
Once this plywood support was in place, I framed out the other horizontal members of the pilot’s seat. These horizontal members needed precise lengths and angles cut to allow them to fit in correctly.
I reinforced the seat supports with small gussets cut from 1/8″ plywood. Whilst these aren’t shown on the plans, I really wanted a very sturdy seat as a failure of the seat would impinge on the control linkages – potentially causing a bad day. The gussets are shown below from underneath. The top surface does not require gussets as the 1/4″ plywood seat will be glued on that side.
I added short vertical members at the front of the seat to help take the vertical loads to the fuselage longerons and cross brace. This glue-up was not pretty!
