Author: olanandkate

Wrapping up this section for now and I will come back to it at a later date. I fabricated all four of the rudder cable linkages and got them installed. I will need to remove them later when I have a bunch of parts to prime so I can prime them. I also still need to tighten down the brake lines that the brass compression fitting won’t fit over right now. I’ll get a heat gun on it soon to try it again. But everything else in this section has been completed!

I also decided to take a look at how the avionics would look on the panel. I honestly think I’m going to have to have to go with the Aerosport 310 panel to fit everything. I need to find someone that has one installed that I can sit in their plane and see how it affects my ability to use the control stick. I would imagine if it was a big deal not many people would buy it.

I installed the steel braided lines which wasn’t too difficult since it is basically just screwing on both ends. The flexible lines were a bit more of a pain. The brass ferrules that needed to be installed in the ends of the lines were pretty difficult. I tried boiling the lines to soften them which didn’t help as much alone. I ended up finding a bucking bar that gave me good leverage to start the insertion and then boiling the end was somewhat helpful but I found a heat gun with some careful management made it much easier. The only thing I’m lacking is screwing the lines in. The brass compression fitting and nut won’t make contact due to the brass ferrule so I will probably have to heat that up as well to help with screwing the nuts down.

I then spent the rest of my time putting the rudder cable guides in which wasn’t terribly difficult.

Ok, I ended up having more time than I expected. By the time we got to the game we were only 20ish minutes away from kickoff and parking was now way too far away so I dropped the family off and went home. I ran the rudder cables while I was there which was much more difficult than I expected as the bushing they are running through require you to squish them to fit the spade of the rudder cable through it. Which this meant that all of the bushing I had installed previously had to be removed again, push the cable through it forcefully in the correct orientation and then reinstall it by running the cable through first and reseating it. And a few of these were deep in the tailcone which made it VERY difficult to get into without laying in it. But I didn’t want to put all 240lbs of me in the cone so I had to do the very difficult way LOL Either way, I got them run. Come to find out I have the same issue with the nutplates here as I did with the brake line on the firewall. It is a K1000-3 which is a 10-32 thread/size but the bolts they want me to put in there are 8-32…. I’m just going to order a good amount of them from Aircraft Spruce and be done with it. I don’t want to hit up my tech counselor every time I need one or two bolts. So I’ll bolt down the rear adel clamps which hold the rudder cabling sheath in place at the tail of the aircraft when I get those in. Oh, and I installed the brake reservoir on the firewall which didn’t take but 5ish minutes.

When I got home from picking the family up from the game I got the rudder pedal system installed. This took some drilling, cutting in half, and mounting of these plastic like blocks. I know it is a durable plastic but I don’t know what kind it is. Either way it made it where the pedals were pretty slick and moved well. All in all it was a good day’s work with three posts today.

I didn’t get a ton of time today as I have a baptism that I get to attend and then my son is playing in the OU band tonight for their high school recruitment night so I got as much as I could done. I got the pedals assembled, installed, and the brake master cylinders bolted on. I also got the fittings installed on them and now I just need to install the rudder pedals into the plane. I need to see if they sent me a brake reservoir with my brake kit. I’m not finding it but it also could be in storage. I’ll swing by there after the baptism and see if I forgot it when I went last time.

While I’m still waiting to decide on what fuel system I want to use, I went ahead and started section 37 which is the installation of the rudder pedals, brake cylinders, and rudder cabling. So the title pretty much wraps up the total time I’m counting in this post for this section. Though I did have a visit from my EAA tech counselor today who graciously delivered me a 10-32 screw for the front firewall brake lines LOL I hope to have a hardware repository like him someday. I also got the additional hardware storage in today so I finished putting that away.