Title: Rudder pedal assy
This entry actually takes place over a few days. Due to the holidays, the family is home and I've just been ducking out to the shop for an hour here and there. Fit the brake pedals to the rudder pedal assy, but elected to not drill the pedals to the master cylinders until I can sit in the airplane and play with the geometry to get the pedal angle in a comfortable position. Drilled the blocks that the rudder cross bars nest into. These get match drilled to the skin stiffiner angles, so hole location needs to be somewhat precise. I made a jig for my drill press so that I could get them all as precise as possible. Drilled them to a #10 per print. CAUTION- drilling these blocks to #10 makes sense because the holes in the plastic seem to shrink the second you take the drill out. But the holes you match drill in the skin stiffeners need to be drilled to a #12 or so for a AN3 bolt. If you drill them with a #10, they will be oversized. I also had to trim about 1/16" off the end of one of the rudder cross bars. Only took a minute on the disc sander. There is a dimension called out on the print and a specific order these have to go in, i.e. one in front of the other. Because of the taper in the fuselage, they aren't the same length, and the print is very specific, not only about length, but about which end to trim if you need to shorten them. Also due to the fuselage taper, the holes that the bars ride in on the end blocks are at an angle, so they only fit one way as well. It would be super easy to both this when you're working in an upside down fuselage, so I took a long time with trial fits, measurements and lots of arrows marked in sharpie to make sure I had everything laid out properly. I located the forward most position of the blocks. Per print, has the fwd edge of the block must be a minimum of 3" aft of the aft face of the firewall. That edge isn't parallel to the firewall, so if you mark your 3" on the skin stiffener, the top corner will actually be a little closer than that, so I measured back 3 1/8" and called it good. To adjust pedal position, the plans allow you to drill additional holes with a min spacing of 2 ED between holes so that you can position the assembly fore or aft. I debated match drilling with everything in the fuselage with a 90* drill, but ultimately just unclecoed several pieces, took the stiffeners out of the plane and match drilled them on the bench with the blocks clamped to them. The center support holes are on a different spacing, so theres the potential to run yourself into ED trouble if you don't lay out your hole spacing correctly. I spent several minutes trying to get fancy and calculate hole spacing that would allow me to pick up the same holes for multiple positions, but ultimately just did 3 sets of holes, moving the blocks 1" aft for each set, which hopefully will work out okay when in install and match drill the center support. This will give me 3" of range for final pedal adjustment. I can't imagine I would need more than that.


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