Marine hardware: check

I placed an order with Berkley Point for some hardware ... in fact for pretty much all the marine hardware. A good price break on 25 quick-links made that an easy choice and saved hundreds compared to West Marine. The steel rings are pretty cool and the snap hooks are quite pretty. I dropped in six quick links in the nose section alone. Next for some more cleanup of the nose section, including a new keel and a new structural carry-through since the last one actually wasn't drilled orthogonal as the G4N1 drawing suggests.

Rudder pedals with some control lines

I found some time and worked on the rudder pedals a bit this weekend. First, a suggestion from a friend was to get some 6063 bar stock from a local place for easier bending for the rudder pedals. This worked and was a lot less cutting than the 2" wide piece of bar stock I have been making all my parts from. About an hour after cutting the two pieces to length, I had them both bent (using a spare drill bit to make the bend radius) and then spent some time getting the pieces mounted to the pedals and symmetric left and right. Then I made the little support pieces from 1/4" x 0.035" tube to triangulate the structure.

Here is an overview picture of the control rigging. The piece of white going from the pedals to the nose bolt is just string and will get replaced by some 3/16" shock cord, per plans. For now, it's just providing some resistance so the pedals don't fall over!

The elevator rigging is about how it'll be. I still need to get some larger washers to hold in the turn-around pulleys mounted in the center of the photo. I only had some small AN washers on hand.

Anyhow, yeah the control rigging is coming along nicely. Here is a closeup of the line guides on the control rod tube and the front seat tube. In earlier photos, I had the elevator line guides on the bottom of the tube, before I realized they went on top. I just flipped around that tube :-)

I also put in a little plastic end cap in the aileron torque tube, you can see on the right middle of the picture. I liked how the plastic caps dressed up the front and other tubes, so I sampled one that would fit in this location. Much prettier!

One more thing. My homebuilder buddy has made custom seats for other folks using foam bases. I'm hoping we can get together to fit the space better and be a bit more secure than the parachute cord version.

One other thing. I put in an order for 25 quick-links, several 2" marine snap hooks, and a few stainless steel rings. They should get here middle of next week. Cool, hardware!

Two rudder pedals installed

I had a pair of pair of pieces (4 total) to attach the first rudder pedal. Tonight I whipped up 4 more to attach the second rudder pedal. Now both of my pedals are riveted to their hinge pieces and are mounted on the eye bolts. Cool. Now I need to make the long 9" u-shaped piece that makes a place to capture my shoes and attach the control lines too. All in good time...

Here is an image of putting the hinge supports on. The holes are match drilled by using a cleako and a clamp after the first one and then replacing the clamp with another cleako. This way I'm assured that the holes are all aligned when I install rivets.

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 :-)

Short update

I have a few pictures for this update. I am sort of in detail-mode right now. I'm out of all the big tube material from last order, so it's time to start tweaking those little details that I glossed over to make forward progress. For instance, I used my West Marine quick-link and some sampled (free!) Alliance Plastics plugs on the nose area to make the tow release. The end caps sure clean up the look of the nose too. I sampled some more end caps hopefully to close out all the 1" tubing in the seat area and give that some more professionalism.

I worked on the aileron linkage underneath the seat too. I added the torque tube doubler (missed that before), so I feel much better about man-handling the controls (though as I understand it, the control forces are actually fairly light). I also split the PVC pipe and filed away material to make a "C" shaped until it fit with just about 1/16" of gap when the C was closed up to a circle. When I glue the bushing into the frame, the epoxy will help keep this gap from opening. Additionally, I added the 1/4" retainer piece to assist holding that bushing in place. I thought about leaving this with cleacos, but they interfere with the aileron crank, so I went ahead and riveted the support piece in.

As you might tell from the photo, I'm also concentrating on replacing any short bolts with ones that clearly use the shank as the load bearing intersection, instead of the threads. This also means I have at least 1.5 threads showing outside the locknut. I think this is proper use of these bolts, but I'll still have an A&P look over the structure before I do any covering. No sense in pushing when I have wiser folks around to critique.

Last, I added a couple of the line guides for the elevator control system. They are made from 1/4" x 0.035" tube ovalized to 3/16". The tiny supports are cut from the same ovalized stock and I used a Dremel sanding drum to put a curved surface on the ends of the support. This lets the supports have better surface contact and really takes no extra time.

I shall head off comments about the test control line saying it's some parachute cord that I had laying around and is just for mockup purposes. I'll get real spectra/dyneema when the time comes for rigging the lines.

Question: Do the ailerons need some stop-blocks somewhere? My aileron crank touches the wheel at full stick deflection and makes the wheel harder to roll. Maybe Sandlin used a rounder wheel?

We have a tail!

I made a bending jig from a few spare drill bits and a bench vice. This kept from marring the surface of the soft aluminum parts. It took a few tries bending to get the right angle. I bent the pair at the same time so they have the same angle. Eventually I cut the two parts free, cleaned everything up, then started tweaking them individually... I really should mount my vice to the bench.
After a while, I mounted them to my jig and got things moving. Spaced properly and with a perfectly fitting bolt between the two tabs, I was able to match drill each of the connecting holes one at a time to have a perfect joint. Yay, one more hard step to go!




Then I finally actually mounted the tailbooms! The lower one was considerably easier with the nice alignment from the jig and all the close-up attention. The top one wasn't quite as easy. But it's done, so that's that. I used a 3/16" bolt so I can enlarge to 1/4" like I'm supposed to and take care of any misalignment.

I'm happy to sit in the seat with the tail sticking out behind me, self-supported. I just have to be careful not to lean it over and twist the two joints all to pieces.

The tail is almost on

I'm making great strides on the vertical tail, almost to the point of getting it put on the fuselage! To start, this is where I am with the vertical tail. I'm out of 1/4" tubing for the truss structure, but what I have done gives me a good idea that adding the other trusses will be pretty trivial. I did 3M the glass tape on the two rudder ribs that had not been finished. I will indeed be taking out that one finished rib and redoing it.

Here is a closeup on the lower rudder connection area. You can see the vertical tail ribs made of 1/4" tubing and the different composite rib on the rudder. The lower rudder hinge area is that crazy bolt area in the middle of the photo. I put the rudder stop blocks in yesterday too, though one is a touch longer than the other. I think I'm shooting for about 20-30deg of rudder deflection until I can find the recommended throws. I also pinched the tail skid with the intention of rounding it off somehow later.

I also have the top rudder connection pretty well completed. The hinge was a piece of cake part with a slight bend in it and the tapered rib on the vertical tail is the same as on the lower side. You can also see the horizontal tail connection part, yet to have a modification to further thread the bolt for a captured part. The rudder rib in the lower left hand of the photo is the one I'll remove and redo. It might look decent from this zoom level, but I'm just not happy with it in person. In other news, I have not put the elevator control rigging slot in the upper boom yet (that would be between the rudder post and the h-stab mount). I'll probably wait that one out until I start all the rigging.

To mount the vertical stabilizer to the fuselage, I made a little tooling jig to hold the mounting flanges the proper 1.75" distance apart. This way, I would be assured that the tail boom would fit perfectly and the fuselage holes would be match drilled to suit. Unfortunately, where I put the bend in the mounting parts meant the bolts would physically conflict with other bolts in the area, so I have to redo those parts. This next time, I'm going to leave the fuselage end undrilled until I can hold them both up to the fuselage and ensure proper clearance. I am pretty happy with the jig though! It looks ungainly, but it worked great for the test fitting.

Finally, I leave you with a shot showing the temporarily clamped beast all put together. I don't have a wonderful place to take photos, so it's a busy background, but I think the idea still gets across .... the tail is almost on! It's remarkable to put it all together like this and realize this is actually going to be an airplane :-) I'm excited to finish off the little material I have remaining and do some cleanup on the tail section. I think within the week I should be able to get the v-tail actually mounted to the fuselage and start mounting the horizontal stab too. Perhaps I'll work on the tail ribs some more as well and feel like I'm actually finishing something off. Right now I sort of feel like I've started all the major sections (less wings of course) and completely finished none of them. Perhaps the rudder should be first to finish. Who cares though, I'm having fun :-)