The Flying Maige - Foot Pedals

Frame 1 Frame 2

tail boom h trim fin slider assm vert. trim fin tail rotor

mount shaft tub split body panels final fit

cyclic collective foot pedals

main sprocket secondary drive motor clutch exhaust heat shields

alternator & wp radiator and fan fuel system

When I first looked at the construction process for the foot pedals I thought they would take a couple of hours to complete. It seemed so simple. However as with many of the RW processes, things aren't always as they appear. It looked like after manufacturing the two scissor beams, the rest would easily slip together. Well, read on to get the rest of the story.
Here are the two scissor beams after manufacture. The aluminum scissors started out as rectangular flat stock with the bushing holes already in place. I was really pleased at the finished look of the scissor beams after sawing, drilling, filing and fine brushing them. I think I'm getting better at manufacturing aluminum parts. The aluminum bushing plug that fits into the nylon bushing needs to protrude 10 thousands of an inch so the bushing rotates freely when the plug is bolted to the frame. You can see the plug uninstalled in the scissor beam in the foreground while the one in the back ground is completely assembled
As it turns out, the plugs were not long enough to protrude 10 thousands of an inch through the bushings. I used a pad sander with 150 grit paper to sand the bushing for the proper clearance. It was no big deal.
The one thing that threw me on this assembly was the foot pedal castings would not slide onto the pedal shaft. The inside diameter of the pedal was too small. RW doesn't say anything about this in any of the documentation. It took me a while to figure out how to hone out that large area without a honing stone. I came up with the Handy Dandy Home Made Broom Stick Hone. Wow, don't you just love that greasy garage hair look?
This is a picture of how I made the Handy Dandy Home Made Broom Stick Hone. I used 150 grit sticky back sand paper to wrap around a broom stick. I added popsicle sticks to adjust the diameter as needed. As you can see in the picture above, I continued to rotate the foot pedal on the HDHMBSH until I got the proper diameter. Even though it was a little slow, it worked great. Huumm, I need to include this in my tools section....
Once I got the pedals installed, I used a straight edge to get them properly aligned. It was a simple matter of adjusting the link connecting to the scissor beams.
Here you can see the foot pedal assembly completed. I really enjoyed building this assembly even though I was aggravated by having to hone out the pedals to fit on the shaft. I'm finally getting used to the idea that RW doesn't always tell you every thing and when the RW video states "assemble as shown", it's not always that simple. It only took me about 5 hours to do what I thought would be a two hour job. I probably spent more time on finishing the scissor beams than I needed to; but I'm very pleased with the end result.