This was one of "those" days. Nothing bad happened, but nonetheless I felt like I was swimming upstream all day long.

I installed the H/S yesterday with bolts just snugged down but not torqued. When I got to the hangar this morning with the idea that I would install the vertical the same way and then start working on fitting the empennage fairings.

All of my flight controls are wrapped in blankets and stacked up in the hangar and the ailerons were on top of the vertical stab, so for no other reason than that I decided to mount and rig the ailerons first. I expected that its would take a couple of hours and then I would get on to the empennage.

Well first of all, I originally rigged these in the garage when I first mounted the wings. The bellcrank to aileron pushrods were the ones I inherited with the wing kit, and they had the rivet tails squashed over. I had rigged everything with them, but then I ordered and fabricated new ones.

Now I carefully measured the old ones, then took the helm joints off them to transfer over to the new ones. I then started hanging the left aileron, and realized that the piece of tape on the wing where I had sketched out the correct washer stackup had disappeared sometime in the last year and a half.

I was playing with this when my hangar neighbor Ron Hart came over and he helped me for a while. Eventually we got it figured out. After that one, I thought to check my build log online, and sure enough, I had captured that data in an entry with pictures, specifically so it would be easier to put this back together.

Based on that, it only took a few minutes to hang the next one.

I thought that I had the new pushrods the exact same length as the olds ones, but something wasn't right. When I pinned them with the stick straight and one aileron neutral, the other one was up about 1/4" at the trailing edge. Not cool.

I took the pushrods out again and decided to start from ground zero. I knew that the stick to bell crank pushrods hadn't changed, so I reasoned that if I fixed the bell crank in the proper neutral position with the rigging fixture I could then adjust teh smaller aileron pushrod correctly.

In trying to install the tooling fixture and small pushrod in the bell crank, I managed to drop the bolt. When it hit, I knew it was in trouble, because instead of the think that a bolt makes when it falls to its final home, this made more of a looney tunes sound o something bouncing around like. a plinko ball that going to end up who knows where.

I stuck my arm up to the shoulder in the wing feeling around in the various bays and didn't feel it, so out came the flashlight and mirror. No joy. Then the the camera on my phone from every conceivable angle. Where the heck is that thing??? I thought maybe it had fallen out of the wing after all and looked all around the floor, I even looked in my shirt pockets. I spent, no joke, over an hour looking for that freaking thing.

After all that, I finally discovered that it had bounced one bay over, ricocheted off of who knows what, and fallen down into the pitot mast. I was able to retrieve it with a magnet.

Once that was sorted, it was pretty easy to zero out the ailerons and then reinstall all the associated bushings, washers etc.

As far as control travel, I have the per print hard stops but somebody on VAF has pointed out that a 1" delrin washer/bushing over the aluminum bushing on the pushrod bracket attach at the aileron will land a little softer the it hits the stop. I had previously sorted these, and I installed them now as part of this rigging process.

What happens is that when the aileron goes up, this bushing hits the bearing support bracket slightly before the other leg of the aileron hinge bracket hits the hard stop riveted on the side of the same bearing support.

The hard stops are installed so that they will limit control travel very close to the max allowable throws (up 30* down 17*). while the delrin block pulls that back more toward the lower end of the range. After this was all together, I checked throws with a digital inclinometer and got an average of 26.6* up and about 15.5* down.

Torqued everything that I touched today as unless something unexpected comes up these won't need to come apart again.

Attis point, the only thing left on the aileron system is securing the pushrod bolt thru the bottom of the left stick (I was short one specialty washer and have ordered more from vans) and teh final length adjustment of the roll servo pushrod.

It's good to have all this done, but it sure seem slick it shouldn't have taken a full day to get it accomplished!