Rudder Pedals

I did some work on the rudder pedals. I did a test wrap of the 1" wide cloth a while back with quite unsatisfactory results. After cutting all the wrap off and sanding things flush again, I decided to go with some 6oz S-glass I had laying around. I put a similarly sized piece to seal the top and bottom of the pedals and then did a bias cut wrap around the pedal in one piece, using 3M Super 77 to make it all awesome. This is tremendously nicer than doing it with strips and the 3M really helped too. I show here one pedal wrapped except for the little exposed piece at the bottom and the other pedal with just the top end seal done. The other ends of the tube were sealed out with a hunk of foam wedged in the end of the tube. The bottoms will just stay open.

I actually epoxied them tonight too. I used an acid brush to push the epoxy down through the layer(s) of glass. It's not the most structural way to do it, but this is just a rudder pedal, so I have no doubt even this method is overkill. I wrapped the pedals in peel-ply to make a prettier finish and stuck them in a trash bag and used my vacuum to give a few inches of vacuum. It actually pulls down pretty well and I'm sure is more pressure than my tool chest's weight over the area of the pedals stacked on top of each other. This'll keep 'em flat though. Tomorrow I open my Christmas present and see how I did this go around.

I also put in two more sleeves into the cabanes that I missed the first time around. Now I simply have to replace the upper aft triangle tube that was a little short and the cabanes will be happy.

Progress is fun. It'll be nice to work through getting the tail group completely installed and take this puppy outside for a real assembly! (without the wings yet of course)

By the way, to the gifter of the drill, it works quite well, thank you :-)