Clear Coating Control Surfaces

We ran out tonight just long enough to clear coat the ailerons and elevators to kick off the long weekend. I want to get the fuselage back into the hangar on Saturday so we can work on it, so we needed to be done with painting. They look nice, and I’m officially bringing the paint […]

Strong Pitch Trim System

Here is another situation where we’ve decided to stray from the manual. The factory system is a candy-cane shaped fiberglass spring system, with a linear actuator pushing against it to provide pressure relieve to control stick’s pitch inputs. This spring is reported to be of mixed effectiveness, and of sketchy reliability, so we’ve elected to […]

Balancing the Elevators

The last thing to do the canard (in this chapter at least) is the check the balance and travel. First you must connect the elevators at the center hinge/inboard counterweights, then fixture the trailing edges with your I-Beam. Then using 2 shorter section of I-Beam attached to trailing edge find neutral, and check for 28 […]

Mounting torque tube and counterweight arms

There is simply a ton of work to do on the canard and elevators. This section talks about the center hinge are, but as you can see above we lined this out and installed it during Head Start week with the rest. Then we measured from the center hinge out 20 1/2″ onto both elevators and trimmed […]

Setting the Elevator Position

The trailing edge of the canard was next tapered to about .03″, and 4 straightedges were attached to the canard and elevators to hold them in alignment while the hinge arms were potted in. The elevators are checked to be in alignment with a string down the torque tubes, and the gap to the canard […]

Installing Hinge Arm

Once the hinges have cured, we mounted the hinge arms to each hinge and placed the elevators in the trailing edge slot of the canard. The hinge arm locations were then transferred to the canard, and slots were carved out of the canard to accept them approximately 3/8″ x 1 -1/4″ all the way to […]