Twisted: Week 140 - Throttle/Brake, Gear knees and Fuel setup

Hours to date: 1239.25

First up the Throttle/brake assembly - which has been rebuilt so that the levers are both on the left hand side - the throttle is much less likely to be moved by the pilots leg in this setup.

From the close ups you'll see the standoff made by my engineering friend from New Zealand. This plane is truly an international affair. German kit, Belgian engine, US instrumentation, Italian prop? and a Kiwi builder living in the UK.

I've also put a fat fibre washer in between the throttle and brake - it gives a much nicer feel to the throttle action.

I may end up putting a sheet of thick rubber (with slots for the levers) bonded over the top of the hole currently covered at the bottom by the (draft stopper) brushes. I saw this on the Twister that had the tailplane failure when it was in Pete's workshop. Seems like a good idea to stop FOD.

Onto the fix up jobs. The gear leg knees were reinforced with roving but as you can see below this left a very uneven surface. Not good as this surface will take all the weight onto it's mount and sits on only a very thin piece of rubber (1mm). So I've used the Dremel to smooth out the surface then used flock to fill in the gaps and finally wrapped the lot again in carbon. The surface is now nice and smooth and should transfer the load evenly onto the gear mounts. The extra layer of carbon will not affect the gear alignment as it is a forwards and backwards movement of the inboard end that sets that up - the dihedral of the gear will be ever so slightly affected - but we are only talking about 1 mm or less here.

The other two little jobs are the seat back extension (on the fuse) and repairing the hex for the elevator that I screwed up.

A heavy box arrived the other day and it was full of fuel parts from the UL Power agent here in the UK (Mark at Galaxy Microlights - who is a friendly and helpful chap.)

As you will see below I have the initial layout sorted out.

Next steps will be to sort out the fuel pumps mount - probably best to do this with Micro methinks. I have some doubts as to the capability of the mount - the two fuel pumps are very heavy - 1.6kg - and they will be 6 times that weight pulling down on this mount when doing aeros. I'm thinking of using 6 composite mounting bolts on the outer holes and maybe bonding it to the micro & cell underneath, I may even add some more composite mounting bolts in the centre - we'll see. I'll certainly be using 2 hose clamps for each pump to hold it in place.

The pre filters are very light - as is the fine filter.

All the fittings and hose that I ordered should arrive this week - so hopefully we'll see some real progress this weekend.