Having removed almost everything above the waterline, I’m turning my attention to the remaining floor section, which one recent visitor said “looks more like a boat than anything else.”
The strategy with this task is to divide the floor into pieces that are small enough to get through my basement door, taking advantage of the original Boeing structure to leave matched holes that will allow for realignment later.
After some investigation and feasibility experiments with drilling out various rivets, I settled on a line parallel with the lateral axis of the aircraft, about ten inches forward of the cockpit door frame. Underlying this line is a heavy spar that is attached to the aft part of the floor by six lighter spars that run longitudinally. Fortunately these lighter spars were secured to the heavy one with aluminum rivets, thankfully easy to drill out given the awkward spaces in which I had to use the right angle drill. I’m still looking for a more efficient way to drill out the steel huck rivets that continue to slow me down. An online hint to use a masonry drill bit did not seem to be much faster than the standard black oxide.
