Matt's RV-7 Project

Here are the rudder pedals, with all the different pieces either primed or powder coated and riveted together.

I clamped some lumber to the bench so I could hang the pedal weldments in their natural state. Here I've temporarily bolted in one set of pedals and brake master cylinders. You can see that when the pedals themselves are lined up, the vertical parts of the weldments are not parallel, because of the way they're mounted.

One of my weldments seems to have been made a little crooked. When the pilot's pedals are lined up, the copilot's pedals are off by about 1/2". I figure this is not worth worrying about – I'll just build it so the pilot's pedals are straight, and the copilot will be the one who has to deal.

I stole Checkoway's method for marking the location to drill the hole for the bolt that attaches the brake master cylinders to the pedals. With everything aligned and clamped in place, I used a short drill bit to scribe a reference line. Then I took everything apart to drill and deburr the holes. Doing it that way was a lot easier than trying to drill everything in place.

Here's a bottom view of how the brake cylinders attach to the pedals. The plans show a stack of four washers and tell you to use however many are necessary to make the cylinders line up. Four seemed to work out just fine for me.

Another view:

Here's one of the side bearing blocks in which the rudder pedal tubes pivot. You can see I've already drilled three sets of mounting holes (the forwardmost and rearmost positions share a central hole in common). This is to allow customization of the seat-to-pedals distance, but if my experience with the RV-9A is any guide I'll probably just bolt them in the forwardmost position and leave them there for all time. I used the angle drill with a longish #12 bit to make these holes.

I trimmed a chunk out of the center rudder pedal brace in order to clear the firewall recess, and drilled the holes that will mount it to a firewall stiffener. I also drilled the bolt holes in the center bearing block and then split it lengthwise so it can be installed. My bandsaw with the metal cutting blade didn't like cutting the UHMW very much, but a regular crosscut wood saw went right through it.

I match drilled the pilot holes I previously drilled in the center brace into the firewall stiffener with the angle drill. You could probably build a whole airplane without one of these, but I wouldn't want to try.

Drilling the center bearing block to the brace involved a lot of fitting, clamping, and removing the assembly from the airplane in order to drill from the back side. This might have been easier with a slow build kit but it turned out okay.

I put some lightening holes in the brace and marked some areas for trimming. You can also see from the hole pattern that the hole spacing on the center bearing block is different than on the side blocks, so the center hole can't be reused. I wonder why they did it that way? Oh well, at least I didn't have any edge distance problems with any of these holes.

Here's the final version of the center brace after being trimmed and filed.

The rudder pedals are now ready to mount in the airplane, except first I need to put cotter pins in all the castle nuts. I also need to order some shorter drilled-shank bolts to use in a couple places where the plans called out a bolt that was way too long.

I was out of town all weekend, so I didn't get any work done on the plane. On the way out of town, though, I picked up the rudder pedals from the local metal coatings place where I'd dropped them off to be powder coated. They turned out pretty well. The color is a lighter shade of grey than I'm planning to paint the interior, but the finish should be durable enough to stand up to repeated shoe-scuffing. Not bad for twenty bucks.

Since I received the parts I needed, I made the other seat back brace tonight:

I spent the morning riveting together all the stuff I primed yesterday. Here are the seats, the tunnel cover, and a seat back brace:

Here are the seat adjustment thingies riveted to the top of the F-705 bulkhead. Okay, you can't really see much, but they're there.

Here's the elevator bellcrank riveted together and being test-fitted in its home:

In the afternoon I started on the rudder pedals. Here they are, two pairs of rights and lefts. I managed to avoid the classic blunder of building one of the pedals backwards.

These took a lot of deburring, as the material is pretty thick. I still need to do some work deburring the lightening holes.

Here are the pedal weldments and bearing blocks being test fitted. I drilled the holes in the bearing blocks on the drill press, but I haven't drilled the blocks to the fuselage yet.

You may have noticed a wall clock in one of the photos above. I bought it at the hardware store today for $6.99, with the intention of putting it up in the garage. It has a plastic hook for hanging on a wall. It has markings on the face, numbered 1 through 12 inclusive. It has three different indicating hands. It has many other features – however, when a battery is inserted, it does not actually keep time. Naturally, as this is one of the primary functions of a clock, I was fairly put out.