I take no pride in illustrating my fix for front bearing flanges which
tighten.
Since this assembly is awkwardly against the floor of the aeroplane at the
base of the control stick, access is limited,even though the cockpit module is
not yet fixed in my case.
As builders will know, the rudimentary tufnol block with a hole is sandwiched
between a flanged bush and the backface of the control stick fork. this is
then glued and rivetted onto the tube which works the aileron bits. I tried to
increase the gap between these components by derivetting (OK),and softening
the redux with a hot air gun whilst levering. \\\\I got myself into a terrible
sweat, but nothing moved. Indeed if you wanted good illustration of the
futility of the rivets, this was it!
I knew that I had set the components on squarely during assembly, and that the
tufnel blocks rotated nicely before assembly to the cockpit module, and that
there was a clearance on the bore of the hole in the block. Accordingly any
temperature pinch could only be a few tenths of a thou. So. I looked for
miss-alignment of the rear tufnel bearings first.
I removed all of the rear fittings and the rear bearing nuts and bolts.
Knocked the rear bearings off the flox supports, leaving each tube to rotate
freely on the front bearing alone. On one side minor miss-alignment was
present which would have caused the flanges to bind on the tufnol. A bit of
careful packing on reassembly solved that one, but I knew that I had not
acheived very much.
So! I had come down to my only remaining choice.--The thin hack saw blade!
I removed everything which would restrict the the tube from turning as far as
possible. This did give me 360 deg. access, even though the tube was not able
to turn fully. And then "hacko" down the front of the tufnol bearing cutting
away the aluminiun face of the controlstick fork bracket.
It was hard work, but it was successfull. I cannot say that I removed all of
the face, but it did not matter, after all the worst cause of stiffness was
going to be friction at the biggest radius under the coldest conditions.
Clearly, cutting through the control tube is not advocated even though it
would solve the friction problem permanently. You can see how far to go by the
penetration of the hacksaw blade. But then, I did not need to go down to the
bush before getting a good result.
The whole exercise took about 4.5 hours- on a cold morning
I will be interested to hear if you try it Erich, "at your discretion", of
course .,But see if any one has any better ideas first..
Good luck.......Bryan
|