During the week, I had a comment on the blog about whether the steel bungee strap rod has enough clearance in a hard landing not to hit the engine mount. I hadn’t even thought about this as a possibility so we bounced the plane pretty good and sure enough the rod hits the mount. So we got a hacksaw and cut the rod down and we tightened the spring so that it will absorb much more of an impact.
I think this gives us about an inch and a half of space, maybe an inch less than absolutely needed but with the spring absorbing the impact I’m satisfied. But I’m glad Jim brought it up.
On to the planned work of the day, the nut kit for mounting the cable to the brake had arrived so we could attach the cable to the brake. First thing though, Allen and Scott had decided that their original bracket was too small so Allen made a new one.
This bracket keeps the sheath of the cable from moving when is it actuated. The cable could then by attached to the brake lever.
A couple of tests seemed to suggest that it all works. Two caveats though…. if you pull the brake rod out too far you will go past the range that locks it so it would good if there was a way to put a stop to prevent that. Also, it seems like we are just on the edge of the 27.5 degrees that the brake requires so it might be worth taking the cable back just a bit.
No pictures for this, but we also cut down the rod that was inside the brake cylinder mount where the pedal attached. I wanted more of an angle on the brakes so they would require more of a toe action. The rod was preventing the pedals from going down so shortening them helped.
Hand brake done, I installed the final finishing touch.
Next up we wanted to (re)trace the trailing edge of the wings to be sure we knew where our wiring was going to go. We had done this before but we really didn’t feel confident we had done a good job with the marking. So my wife joined us to help with lifting the wings back on.
and we retraced and took the wings back off. They’ll be back on again soon for strut rigging. The red line is the original line, the blue line is the new one.
With the hole area drawn we set to drilling holes. After some discussion about connectors on the forums I’ve decided to go with no connectors for the electrical wires, but to use a 90 degree elbow for the pitot/static tubes. They aren’t necessary but they give a nice way to make the 90 degree bend from wing into the fuselage.
Here’s the passenger side, just a hole for the wires and the fuel line fitting.
The pilot side has the fuel fitting, a hole for the wires and two holes for the tubes.
We cut the tubes off at the wings and drilled holes in the seat channel for them to pass through, under the seat, on their way to the panel.
They then pass through the holes already present in whatever the piece is called up the front.
The rest of the route will get decided once the panel is on.
All in all a very productive day, felt like progress was made.