Interior Options & Rear Seat Backs

Interior Options

When thinking about your interior you really have a lot of options on how you want to customize it.  You can be a minimalist having some cloth covered seats, stock panel and an industrial looking cabin.. or you can go the complete opposite of the spectrum and do what Greg Hale did and completely customize your interior to look like a luxury vehicle.  Typical trade offs are that of time, weight, and cost.

My plan is to have an extremely comfortable and nice looking cabin to fly around in that has a finished look about it, not overly concerned with weight.  Well weight is a concern, I'm fine with trading extra weight for comfort. Some builders try to inch out every ounce of useful load to maximize the amount of stuff and people they can put in.  When I think about Air-conditioning, plush padded leather seats, molded panels and the such I know it will add weight, cost and time but if I'm building it, it's going to have what I want.

When you look at interior options there are a few vendors out there who offer a line of RV interior products.  One vendor that's out there with a ton of great stuff and who is constantly making new products is Aerosport Products. I knew early on in the build when I started looking that I was going to use their stuff on this build.  Having already installed the overhead console I can vouch for their quality. This week I worked with Zac to finalize my order and hammer out any of the unknowns and decisions. In the end I'm going all out on this with side panels, carpet, center console, luxury seats, ect.  The great thing is it's not insanely heavy.  I think he told me the center console weights 3-4 lbs.

Rear Seat Backs

Section 42

I previously wrote when I was working on the fuselage about skipping this section.  My intent was to buy some aftermarket seat frames.  There are several options other there, including ones from Aerosport that replace the stock set up.  I originally had thought I would do the ones that match the front seat profile with the headrest molded into the seat. I had also planned to cover the middle area that making it look like a traditional bench style seat.

This week however I changed my mind about that.  One consideration is that open space between the seats that I want the option to close up or leave open.  Having it open I can extend baggage space or say I want to mount a oxygen tank that I can reach from the front seat.. it can go there too.  I also decided against the molded head rest, the main reason is if I use the stock seat backs with an Aerosport adjustable headset I can squeeze the seat belts between the two pieces to help hold them in place.  While I like there's low profile seat since I already had the parts to make the seat backs figured I would save a few hundred dollars and work some metal.

It was great to get back to working with some metal and I thoroughly enjoyed putting these together. In fact what started out with me going to the garage in order to gather all the parts together actually ended 4 hours later with me priming everything up.  Nothing really to talk about, you take the half a hinge from an earlier step, the big back piece and do pieces of aluminium and get cutting, grinding, sanding and drilling.  Debur it all and paint it up.  Now these will be completely covered so you could skip the priming but figured if there's any condensation or something spilled on the seats, might as well have them protected a bit.  Plus priming makes them look pretty.

After giving it a day or so to dry it's just a matter of clecoing everything back together and then running some rivets. A few of the rivets I had to buck since the pneumatic squeezer couldn't get to them but no major issues.  All in all straight forward and was fun use of 5 hours or so.  Also nice to use some tools I haven't had much time with since starting all this fiberglass.

Rear Seat Backs Complete