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Monday, January 27, 2014

Worked on taper pins: 5.5 hours

I continued working on the taper pin mod to the tailwheel mount.

A little background: normally the tail spring and tailwheel bracket are secured using standard AN bolts. This is an area that is prone to issues as the plane ages. In short the standard bolts allow a tiny bit of play but the tail wheel assembly is subject to a lot of abuse. Over time the tiny amounts of play grow larger leading to difficult maintenance to replace bolts, parts etc.

I came upon the taper pin mod in the VAF forum and decided to do it on my RV-7. The mod involves using the tapered pins (AN386) in place of the standard bolts. The advantages are that the holes for these pins are reamed, the fit is super tight and the fit is self correcting.

Unfortunately I did not research quite enough at the start and I did not realize that the parts need to be drilled out a bit to get them closer to the taper pin size. Long story short is that I spent a lot of time trying to ream the forward tail spring bolt to size and made only a little progress while dulling the expensive reamer.

Once I opened up the holes first the reaming for the pins went smoothly.

I got stalled on the first pin. After opening up the holes I was able to get the fit of the aft taper pins done with little effort.

I also continued working on fine tuning the fit of the aft most fuselage bulkhead.

 

First aft taper pin done: