Even though I SITLL don't have joystick assemblies, I decided it was time to get going on the pushrods. Now that the long elevator pushrod is in, it was time to put in the short pushrod and the flat control tube and motor.

First things first, I put all the eyebolts and jam nuts on the pushrods. I got normal but thin left hand threaded nuts, but the thin right hand thread (aka “normal thread”) nuts were nylon locknuts. They go on pretty easily when the nylon is the last part to go on, but when they are acting as jam nuts, I wanted the non-nylon part of the nut up against the pushrod, which meant that I had to thread the eye bolts into the nuts from the nylon side. This sounded hard to me, and it turned out to be harder than I expected. I ran the eye bolt through the nut the “correct way” a few times to thread the nylon a little bit, then put the nut into a vise to hold it, then pushed hard and turned the eyebolt into the nut the wrong way. That was about an hour or so of work to do the 6 pushrods.

Then I had to figure out how to get the long and short elevator pushrod “axel” (my description, don't blame Sling for that!) bushings into place. This was hard because the thick brackets were already riveted to the thin metal that holds the bushings. It took some bending (but not creasing!) of the thin metal, and I was eventually able to get the bushings in. Those should never come out!

Putting the rivnuts into the top clamps that go over the bushings was easy (thanks for small blessings) and I decided to just cleco them in place. I have this bad feeling that at some point, I will need to move them to put something else in. I can already see that I will need to use the hand riveter to get at most of the rivets, so I don't want to have to drill any out.

At first, the elevator tube was hard to move back and forth and the flap tube was VERY hard to move. I was thinking about shaving down the bushing and then I remembered that I used grease to slide the long elevator tube through a bushing, so I put some grease in and around these bushings, too. They are now incredibly smooth and easy to operate, and I didn't need to take anything apart. I will make a note to clean and re-grease the bushings during condition inspections.

Putting in the flap motor was easy enough, especially since I could rotate the flap tube easily. In order to test it out, I just needed to put 12V on the Red and Black wire (reversing polarity reverses direction, just like a DC motor which, I guess, it is). Thanks to Adam at Midwest Panel Builders for the “how to” on testing the motor.

The last thing I was told on these assemblies was that I needed to rivet the rings in place (see picture with blue arrow). It makes sense because I don't want the axels sliding back and forth, but I put this in the same category as the rest of the riveting - I don't *really* believe that it is ready to go yet, so I am going to hold off on putting in the rivet.