Pilots Throttle - Part 1

Hardware

The THROTTLE QUADRANTS FOR RV - MODEL CT82F  from Aircraft Spruce was chosen as it's 38 mm width allowed the assembly to be enclosed in the envelope of the bulkhead on the port side. At the same time a dual cable and accessories were purchased to operate the twin carburetors.

This model's mixture control will be used to operate the Rotax's engines choke.

This is the same model used in the current Flying Legend factory prototype.



Panel Construction
The panel frame was manufactured from 0.030'' 2024-T3 aluminium sheet cut with the Ofla knife, dressed and folded. 

With all openings finished the panel was primed and painted to match fuselage.

Flat profile with cutouts for access panel and starter.
The cutout for the quadrant was marked off the access
panel center line

Trial Assembly
Note: AN3 washer packers

Trial Assembly

The throttle quadrant had to be fully disassembled to allow the trial fitting with the unit packed with three [3] AN3 aluminium washers to locate the fascia plate about the center of the opening. The packing is required to retain the edge radius and to allow the fascia plate upper edge to clear that radius [refer image above].

The AN3 bolts with be replaced with longer Unbrako Cap Head screws to obtain a smaller head to allow the maintenance cover to be fitted and removed separately. 

This will be covered in a later blog.

Trial Fitting Fuselage

The panel is fixed to the bulkheads with M3 rivet nuts installed into the bulkhead flange with the base set to match the electrical panel on the opposite side.

Port Fuselage Side

Comment: None of this could be achieved without the bench folder purchased with for this project. It has acted as a folder and a poor mans gillo - invaluable. 

The original blog updated to reflect these comments.

Electrical Panel - Part 1

The PDF files required a lot of editing to be useful by the graphics company so it was back the PC. A CAD package can export a PNG file but when imported into Paint, dimensional control was difficult. What was need was a vector based graphics package like Coral Draw but its expensive and a lot of time was required to use it. 

Searching the net, Inkscape was located and its a vector-based package, best of all its open source so after a lot of work a procedure that produced a suitable output was developed.

Procedure
The panels were drawn to in Auto-Cad [or any 2D package] then exported as a PNG file. This file was imported into Paint and trimmed, next all the colouring was completed and then saved as a PNG file. Finally, the PNG was imported into Inkscape and using its vector base was seized in mm's and exported an EPS file for the graphics company.

Paint / Inkscape output

Paint output for Circuit Breaker Panel

The only visual difference between the Paint and Inkscape output is the final sizing of the output for printing.

Paint software - click here

Inkscape software - click here

Where to
A series of files have been sent to the printer and we now move to Part 3 - I hope. If nothing else it was a fun 6 hours of PC work