Today I finally got a major milestone knocked out on the airplane build: Phase I of the front and back seat core fitting.
After finally spending a good amount of time –1.5+ hours to be exact– test-fitting the seat core fitting and comfort, I then annotated all my notes into an email and sent it off to the good folks at Oregon Aero. Then 2 different ~1 hour long phone calls ensued to discuss the particulars of my seat configurations and the tweaks required to modify the cores to meet my requirements.
From the last discussion I was given some homework: some measurements to take… specially to enable the Oregon Aero seat gurus to add vertical sections to both my front and back seat cores so that they follow the contour of their respective front and back seat structures.
Even more specifically, the data Oregon Aero really needed was the measurement from the bottom seat core aft edge to the angle at the top of the seat bulkhead, again both for the front and back seat.
This task for the backseat was simple and straightforward, taking only a minute or two at most.
However, there was wrinkle that popped up for the front seat core: the cut angle on the aft edge of the bottom core didn’t quite match the seat back. As you can see below, at the midpoint of the seat cushion this gap was about 3/4″. On each side it was about 0.9″.
I annotated this information on the pic below and then sent it on to Oregon Aero so they could deal with it appropriately. Clearly if I had blindly followed their instructions the measurement for where the seat cushion angle met the seat bulkhead could have easily been off over 3/4″.
When I say that Phase I for the seat cores is officially complete it’s because I drove about 45 minutes up to the FedEx facility at the New Bern airport to ship the cores back to Oregon Aero.
At over $100 to ship these cores back, believe you me I want to ensure that they are as dialed in and optimally tweaked as possible when they arrive back so that ZERO major tweaks are required when they go back for upholstery!