June 5, 2005

Over the course of last week, I put in some orders for various bits that need sorting out. I ordered a bunch of fittings from Spruce, and the banjo adapters from Andair. I ordered some balsa too for the cabin floor. I’m going to laminate it into the floor to make a sandwich (like on the C5 Corvettes) to help dull down the noise. Balsa is light and strong, and when it’s sealed up in epoxy resin, it should last forever.

Today was quite a good day at the hangar, although it was a bit hot! I started by sorting out the fuel selector mounting. I got it positioned correctly in the console, and made a support plate for it. It’s pretty secure now, and it helps to keep all the plumbing clear. It’s all held together with temporary screws for now.

Next, I worked on the top of the console. I made a plate to support the fuel selector switch and the throttle quadrant. It seemed to take forever to do these things as it was a ‘design & engineer’ on the go! I got the fuel selector switch in pretty quickly. It was the throttle quadrant that took some time. You can see where I got the position of the switch wrong when I put it in the fibreglass to see what it looked like!

Now the tricky part. The quadrant comes with friction lock on the right side, since the basic design was for an RV-8 which is usually mounted on the left hand side. Well, I need the friction lock on the right, so I had to reverse the whole assembly. Trouble is, the top has a rebate milled out of it for the metal bracket. When I reversed the assembly, the levers all fell in the right places with no problems, so it was just a matter of spacing the quadrant for mounting, which turned out to be no problem really. Here’s the hole cut.

Here’s a view from the bottom showing the mounting. I used a couple of pieces of 3/4"x3/4"x1/16" angle. Since one side has to be close to the side of the console, it gets a bit tight fitting in there towards the edge. Here it is almost fully assembled. You can see the thumb lever friction lock. I need to extend the bolt that holds this lot together so it comes through the side of the console.

Here’s a couple of shots of it in the plane. Sweet eh?! I’m really happy with how this is all turning out.