January 25, 2006

There was a service notice a while ago on my version of the Blue Mountain autopilot servos. The clutch mounting plates were coming loose as they wore, so I have some new ones to put in. I figured a good time to do it was now since I had to remove the autopilot servo from the wing after I noticed that I’d run the cable to the wing tip instead of the wing root. Duh! At least I proved it was possible to remove the servo with the wing skin in place! It was harder getting it out of the wing access hole than it was to get it through the lightening hole in the rib, because of the orientation of it, and the upper wing skin being in the way, but it came out OK.

Here’s the clutch end of the servo opened up. I need to remove this clutch and put in the new mounting plates. Not too hard. A bit fiddly to get access to the set screw in there, but not that bad.

Here are the new mounting plates. They use two set screws instead of one. A bit of added security. I still haven’t completed this task. I’ll wrap it up on Sunday.