Hrs: 7

Rudder pedals movement and stops

Some tasks seem easy but take up quite some time, like the rudder pedal movement and stops.

Before inserting the AN3 and AN4 bolts for the stops I had to clear drill the holes because they had quite some paint in them.

The stops are designed that one pedal travels 2.5 cm more. Why? This is also reported by other builders.
This will result that the deflection of the rudder and nosewheel will never be identical. However the POH says that the rudder should have a deflection of 25 degrees l/r (+/- 2 degrees).

Left pedal has 6 cm of movement:

The right pedal has 8.5 cm of movement:

The movement wasn’t that bad but could be improved by using some 400 grit sandpaper and wrapping it around the rudder-pedal-tube (thanks Peter V. for the tip) and sanding the bushings a tiny bit. I also polished the metal pedals at the locations where they move inside the bushings. The left pedal is a bit warped (probably due to welding), to solve this I enlarged the aluminium brackets a bit with the Dremel tool. Because you can’t remove too much material in one shot this process is quite time consuming. The result is good movement.

These bushings don’t need any lubrication but I don’t think that a tiny bit of dry lube will hurt. For sure it will give some rust protection to the unpainted metal inside the bushings. I didn’t had any dry lube but for testing I used some Boelube, now the pedals run super smooth:

Next step was to remove some material from the stops according the construction manual. It says it should be clear of the bolt heads by 3 mm. However the bolt heads to not conflict it’s the metal bracket:

I removed around 4 mm from each stop so that the pedals clear the metal bracket by 3 mm:

The flange was 28 mm and is now 24 mm:

The stops have good clearance now. However I don’t have the minimum required overlap of 10 mm. It’s only 8 mm. Maybe I removed a bit too much but otherwise the clearance with the metal bracket was too small:

I need to check with TAF why the stops are not designed to have the same pedal movement and the pedal overlap.

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