Well, first up, I did order the rudder stop I mentioned earlier – unfortunately, it’s on backorder and won’t ship until probably next week. I did spend a little bit of random time this week thinking about cockpit layout stuff, which culminated in me temporarily hanging the instrument panel, with some paper cutouts of avionics taped to it. I also ordered my front stick grip from Tosten – I’m thinking I can go ahead and fit it to the front stick, and get that stick cut down as needed to go under the panel. I also want to see how the MS grip would work for the rear stick. Originally I’d planned on doing a simpler Tosten grip (I’m using the multifunction MS grip up front), but the other grips have a significant forward can’t to them, which others have said is problematic for clearance to the front setback. The MS is more upright, and I can get one without all the optional buttons.
Anyway, this is all kind of revolving around me wanting to get the cockpit somewhat together-is, so I can spend some time sitting in there, chair-flying and deciding how I feel about my panel/switch/control layout. Which is something I want to do before I finalize everything and get to ordering, probably in the next couple months.
For tonight, the first thing I wanted to do was some final adjustment of the control column. The column hangs from two rod-end bearings, front and rear. When I initially installed this, I took a guess as to how those should be adjusted, which controls where the column actually hangs. I couldn’t find any sort of spec for the adjustment, no matter how hard I looked, so eventually I asked on VAF, and someone pointed it out – it was right on the plans page I’d been looking at. So I wanted to just get those adjusted to the proper length, then double-check all the rigging afterwards. I wasn’t sure if it might affect the resting point of the sticks, but it didn’t seem to.
Next I’d expected to work on the rudder pedals, and maybe route the rudder cables, but I got an unexpected call from a neighbor, which resulted in me helping a local Apache crew with some training, by driving a Humvee around the neighborhood while being stalked by said Apache. So that’s why I only got half an hour in tonight…