I spent most of the evenings last week working on the plug for the horizontal stabilizer. Among other things, I glued together the stack of foam ribs that form the blank for the stabilizer tips, rough-sanded the tips to shape, and sanded down the upper layup where it will scarf to the lower layup along the leading edge.
From the beginning, I've been trying to do everything I can to try eliminate that scarf joint along the plug leading edges, but nothing seemed to work well. But now that I've actually done one of those scarfs (or at least most of one), I can see that it's not going to be the sort of problem I feared it would.
I was hoping to be able to do the layup for the bottom surface of the stabilizer plug last week, but the temperatures never got high enough for the epoxy. Or at least, not high enough long enough for a good cure. Unfortunately, this week doesn't look too good either. So I'll do the prep for the layup, and continue to work on the tips.
Last weekend I finished the last major parts of the rudder pedal assembly. Those parts were the latch that locks the pedal carriage to the rail tube, and the torsion spring that forces the latch to the locked position. It's been a long time since I last made a torsion spring, and I've never been that good at welding, so those parts look kind of hokey. But at least it validated the basic design.
I'd like to thank everybody for their suggestions on the rudder pedal design. Some of the ideas were things that I'd already gotten from the HP-18 and other designs (for example, the S-tubes on the rudder pedals), but there were some good suggestions there. I'll post some pictures of the finished assembly as soon as I can get my digital camera downloaded.
page updated 22 April 2003 all text and graphics copyright (c) 2003 HP Aircraft, LLC