High Mountain Doings

From 8200 feet along one side of the Upper Arkansas River Valley in central Colorado, my blog is about many things: travel including river and bicycle trips, and other experiences as well. The focus is on photography, not lots of text.

Tuesday, June 23, 2009

More Sinus Work

Most recent work has involved getting the rudder cables, from the pedals to the rear, connected. This may not sound like a long job, but it certainly has been. There are four cables (from the two sets of pedals) that need to be double-swaged and connected with cables that go on to the rudder, as will be shown in another post, as soon as I work up the photos.

This shows the center part of the cockpit, where the two control sticks will attach to the black metal bar seen through the square openings. To get that metal bar to fit in, I had to do what's shown below:

This is a view from holding the camera down through one of those square openings and making the photo blind. No flash here. Except with a mirror, I've not been able to see what the camera photographed. I had to Dremel away a lot of material shown here on the upper portion of the indentation in the center post. This allowed the metal bar to fit into place. It would not fit before. I did the work blind, by holding the Dremel tool where near where it needed to be, turning it on, and cutting some of the material away. Then I would feel the notch to see if I thought it was big enough, and it finally was. The metal bar, seen here on the right, partly installed, finally fit. The opening through which light is coming is the right hand square opening seen above. I was unable to get the mirror into this space while also using the Dremel tool (an electric rotary tool into which I can install any of several cutting bits).

This is the tail of the Sinus, where the rudder will mount. The slotted rod is the elevator pushrod which will mount to the lever that's beside it. The bolts with red paint around their tops are bolts that hold part of the mechanism inside the vertical fin. The red paint was applied with a paint applicator (a felt tip pen with paint in it). The paint will provide a quick way of looking to see whether a bolt has moved during aircraft inspections.

Inside the fuselage: This is where I've been working in recent sessions. It's rather uncomfortable. I've been connecting the two rudder cables which emerge from the two white lengths of tubing to two cables each that run from each of the four pedals.

2 Comments:

At 6/27/2009 10:29 AM, Blogger Unknown said...

Looking good Mountain Man! I bought my Sinus to "eat out" but it is fascinating to see yours being built from scratch. I lived 10 years in Fort Collins but now am based in the French Alps where I work as an airline pilot but fly my Sinus almost more than my Boeing! I also love Torque Seal (which I get from Aircraft Spruce) It simplifies preflites by giving an immediate indication of tamper or bolt looseness. Keep up the great work, cannot tell you how much fun the Sinus will be! Mike.

 
At 6/27/2009 11:21 AM, Blogger Tom Rampton said...

Thanks, Mike... Great to know about the Torque Seal.

 

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