Half of today was spent simply finding places to store all of the finish kit stuff. My office looks more like a warehouse at this point. Once that was out of the way though, I got back to working on the rudder pedal assembly. The middle section of the pedals gets a support brace that is mounted to the firewall. I cut a notch in the bottom of it to clear the protruding piece that makes up the firewall recess. The bracket gets riveted to one of the pieces of angle on the firewall, so I laid out some holes that I can match drill into the angle.
There is a plastic block that sandwiches the pedal tubes and bolts to the bracket. I drilled the bolt holes in it, then cut it in half. I attached the bracket on the inside of the firewall angle just to make it easier to drill the angle (picture is before I drilled the holes in the bracket), but it will ultimately be attached on the outside side of the angle.
I drilled the bracket to match the holes in the plastic block. Van's really didn't think this part through though. The bolt hole layout that they call out for this block is different than the holes in the blocks that support the pedal assembly at the ends (they could have been the same had they just made the block a hair longer). For the other blocks, they say to drill extra holes to make it easier to adjust the pedal distance if needed. In order for that to work, you have to allow the center block to move as well of course. I was able to drill one additional set of holes in the bracket, but couldn't get a third. There is room on the bracket for a third location, but because the holes of the different blocks aren't equal, a third location in the center bracket would make one hole so close to an existing one that it would essentially be a figure 8. So for now, I have only two options for pedal distance. I'll just have to see how that works out.
That's all for the pedals right now. I will put the brake pedals and brake cylinders on later. I pulled the pedal assembly out so I'd have more room to finish up the rest of the fuselage. Next up are the floor stiffeners. I clecoed the bottom skin back on and drew center lines on the stiffeners. I'm not quite sure how I'm going to line up the stiffeners for drilling - I suppose duct tape and a lot of crawling back and forth to wiggle them into place.
