It has been a long month of virtually no progress on my Bede BD-4C. When last I wrote, I had spent a week working on rudder pedals, guides for rudder cables, and the bell crank for the rudder at the rear of the fuselage. That was way back on March 18. After that, I tried to mount the brake master cylinders behind the rudder pedals. When I did that, I discovered that the rudder pedal tubes were made wrong and it was impossible to install the master cylinders.
BedeCorp very promptly send me another set of rudder pedal tubes. They had identified the problem as an incorrectly written dimension on a new drawing. Unfortunately, the second set of tubes had bent when welded and the welded had not noticed.
I returned both bad sets of tubes to BedeCorp and headed out of town, to New Jersey, for my step-mother’s 90th birthday party. (Happy birthday, Lorraine!) When I got home, four days later, new, correctly made rudder pedal tubes were waiting for me.
I cut the tops of the tees of the tubes to 3.75″ so my rudder pedals would fit on them. And then I set everything aside for another week. It was “tech week” for The Mousetrap presented by Act II Community Theater in St. Peters, MO, and I am doing sound. Tech week meant that if I wasn’t working or sleeping, I was at the theater so no airplane manufacturing for me.
Yesterday and tonight, I finally got back to the plane. I drilled out the nutplates for mounting the rudder pedal tubes (they were in the wrong place). Then I drilled new holes for the nutplates, just about an inch from the old ones, and riveted the nutplates back on. Here is a photo of one pair of the nutplates (there are four pairs). You can see the old holes next to the new holes.
This piece is now in my “paint booth” with a fresh coat of black paint on it and I am waiting for the paint to dry. The rudder pedal tubes are also in the paint booth with primer drying on them, waiting for black paint.
