23 Sept 04 - RV Rides and Gas Tank Torquing

The evening started out with the last summer meeting (read: at an airport, so people can fly to it) of the TVRVBG, so we went bombing out to DAAS to hang out in Bob and Sam's hangar. RV rides were offered, donuts were consumed, and I even got some stick time in Al Wright's and Steve Mustaikis' RV-6A. After all this motivation, it was back to the shop to work on bellcranks and other wing stuff.

Here I am with Steve in Steve and Al's Batplane.	Josh in Dave Stafford's RV-6.	Gas tank bolts to the torqued.
There's been some discussion about these bolts - apparently on some quickbuild kits they have been torqued and on some they haven't been torqued. Therefore, it's necessary to go check all the torques. Gas tanks falling off in flight isn't an attractive idea to either the person in the plane or the person standing underneath the airplane watching it fly. For what it's worth, all but three bolts on these tanks were tight enough, and two of the ones that weren't were just sort of sitting in there, so it's a good thing that we checked.
More bolts to torque - this was the first time we had taken off these access plates.	. . . the ones on the end of the wing. This is where the loose bolts were.

Also, we contemplated the mystery of why one of the bellcranks works like we want it to, and the other one does not. We solved the mystery, but didn't take any pictures so you'll have to setle for a verbal description - one of the aileron bellcranks is a bit shorter than the bolt holes in the wing spar, so when it's torqued in there, the L-brackets are squished enough so that the bellcrank doesn't rotate without binding.

There are a few ways to fix this, and they are:

• Buy new bellcrank parts from Van's.
• Put a washer between the bellcrank bushing and the bellcrank, thus making everything a bit longer.
• Drill the holes in the L-bracket larger. This shouldn't be a problem (i.e., make it flop around) because the bolts that go through these holes are torqued in anyway.

Seems to me that the washer idea is ideal, so we'll probably do it if we can find a washer that is the right size. Otherwise we'll probably just drill the holes a bit larger.

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