John Waldrip's Comments

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At 9:16am on December 8, 2020, Samuel McNair said…
John; the installation on my 801 was also a real dog. My first advice is to not rivet in anything until you have the entire system installed and every change you are going to have to make is done. Just use small screws and nuts, then later go back and rivet. It will save you a lot of rivet drilling, because nothing fits as advertised.

My stick bottomed out too, so I also had to move the brackets upwards. Ditto for drilling the stick to accommodate the wires. And you will have to make spacers for the grips since the dual sticks are smaller diameter than the singe stick.

The stick was too tall on both sides of the AC to easily throw your leg over getting in and out, so I shortened them. I made the one on the copilot side removable using a simple locking pin like you see in use on the 750's. There are times when its best to not have the copilot stick in place and easier to get passengers in and out if it is removable. But it creates jus a bit of looseness which is why the pilot side stick is bolted in.

After connecting up all of the controls, I found that the installation as provided resulted in smashing your knuckles into the panel or slamming the stick into your crotch well before the elevator reached full travel - even with the slightly shortened stick.

To correct for this, I moved the connection point of the push pull tube to the elevator bell crank inwards towards the pivot point about 1". To eliminate interference between he push pull tube and bell crank at this new connection point, I had to fabricate an offset bracket and bolt it to the end of the push pull tube. I suppose that you could also remove the bell crank and notch it to achieve the same end, bit I was not wanting to do anything irreversible. This offset required me to put a small bend in the push pull tube to stop it from rubbing the aircraft structure under the rear seat. All of this corrected the problem with range of motion of the stick fore and aft.

Concerning drilling the tube. I aligned and clamped all of my control surfaces, marked a lay line along the tube. Then installed the new tube, aligned the controls to the same neutral position, and drilled for the bolts with it all in place using a v block drilling guide to keep the holes vertical.

After about 450 hours of flight in this configuration, i noticed that the controls are very stiff in roll and as before very light in pitch. And looseness developed. What I have found is that the front plastic bearing block which supports the tube has worn due to the more excessive side forces that the individual sticks place on the tube as compared to the single center stick. In addition to introducing looseness this allows it to bind on the middle plastic support bearing. And the dual stick just don't provide the leverage in roll that the longer single center stick does. I am investigating replacing the front plastic bearing with a needle bearing or thin cross section ball bearing.

The second source of looseness is that the front seat based surface is too thin to withstand the lateral forces on the stick and it flexes where the horizontal triangular bracket attaches, eventually oil canning and flexing allowing the whole bracket to shift left and right with stick forces. So i am installing doublers on both seat fronts when I get back from this trip. if I don't I expect it will just get looser and soon crack. So just go ahead and reinforce this area to start with.

Yep, if you want the stick to clear the floor boards by a safe amount the rudder cables will just lightly touch the top of the dual stick cross tube, not an acceptable condition. I made 2 free floating plastic sleeves that fit over the cross over tubes. They rotate freely as they cables touch them and provide a renewable wear surface that isn't the cables. After 450 hours not a trace of wear on them. I made the sleeves out of the clear Lexan tubular covers for fluorescent light tubes at Lowes, Just cut 2 pieces, slit them,
At 10:01am on February 10, 2020, Phillip Owens said…

Will be interested to see photos of your purchase, My 801 was sold to a person in your ares

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