Wheels, Pedals, and third time is the charm

Well, as anyone who has been following this blog for a while knows, the airplane is serial number three because it takes me three times to get anything right. Today, it that held true with safety wiring things. Safety wiring is one of those things that it seems should be simple, but apparently one needs to practice. It also isn’t very helpful when there is very limited access to the item being safetied. Anyway, I got the tach drive cap and the induction duct flange done.

When Greg got here, we started by doing the final adjustments to the throttle and mixture cables. It is so much easier to do with two people. One in the cockpit, and one at the fuel injection servo. I am very happy with the rigging. Everything is torqued down with final hardware, and all the cable linkages are locked in place. We may still have to do some adjustments depending on engine run tests. If we have to adjust the idle or idle mixture, the cables will probably have to be re-rigged.

Then Greg went after the main gear wheels. We needed to check the torque on the wheel assemblies, and pack the bearings with grease.  Nothing special there, just a bit time consuming. We are hoping to get the brakes serviced soon as we will need those for an eventual engine run. All of these main gear tasks are in preparation for servicing the brakes.

While Greg was doing that, I worked on the rudder pedals. I have to add a tab onto the pedals to attach the rudder cables to. So I cut one out of 4130 steel, drilled some holes and jigged them to the pedal.

Then I had to get some scrap 4130 out and dust off my amateur and rudimentary welding skills. I ran a couple beads of weld on the scrap and when I was sufficiently convinced I could run an airworthy weld on rudder pedals, went at the real parts. The  welds turned out fine, though I do need to practice more!

Then I cleaned up the pedals and slip tubes and primed them in preparation for paint. Once they are painted, it is back in the airplane for good for the pedals.