Sunday, March 19, 2017

Sunday, March 12, 2017

Wing pin handles, safety pin

The spring operated safety pin to hold the wing pin handle in place needed lots of work. First the cut out in the wing skin is all wrong, so the safety pin will be too far fwd and too much inward to actually do anything.

The safety pin on both sides needs to be re-positioned, and because there already are holes and cut out in the skin, a skin doubler needs to be made. Found some scrap metal to make this.

Then I looked at the safety pin itself. It is spring operated to stay in the locked position by default. A closer look reveals that the spring is only held in place by an insanely tiny clip that easily can be removed by hand. If this clip is removed, the whole spring operation will fail, and the pin can simply slide to the side. It's function will be lost. I decided to make an extra safety mechanism to hold it in place. My old man has built RC planes for almost a century, so I called him to ask if he had some piano wire. He had lots of it, and I "borrowed" some 1 mm wire to make a a small wire with loops in each end. One end goes through a m4 bolt in place of the rivet, and the other end can be placed around the safety pin to physically hold it in place. A very simple fix that should do the trick if the original clip should fail (until it rusts away, and then I will make a new one).



Saturday, March 04, 2017

The Pitot

Finished the pitot. Made a couple of brackets and secured the tubes to the cross over. It became 100% stable.






Thursday, March 02, 2017

The Pitot

I have the Aircraft Spruce pitot. The drawings show a home made type, but also the pitot from Aircraft Spruce is mentioned. There is no clear instruction of how it should be mounted, only is can be screwed onto the skin. I will mount it on the cross over and I also added an extra bracket. I'm still not completely stationed, it could be a bit stiffer.