Nice weather, shame about the split pins.

Armed with all the tools and stuff I thought I might need to reattach the cabin, I returned to the airfield and pulled G-BYJA out of the hangar into the glorious spring sunshine.


I was a little surprised that apart from a couple of other owners also working on their machines, nobody seemed to be flying. At one point we were buzzed by a powered glider who appeared to be attempting to make a downwind landing into the hangar entrance. The two of us watching were quite convinced he was about to crash and started to run for cover behind the substantial walls of the hangar, but he did pull up and cleared the hangar by a small margin.


A bit later, Lynne (I think) turned up and pushed her lovely Pitts Special out with a view to doing a few circuits:

Meanwhile, I was struggling to undo the various bolts holding in the rudder pedal assembly. The bolts themselves weren't the problem so much as the fiddly little split pins. After what seemed like a couple of hours, I succeeded and removed the rudder pedals from the cabin: 

That gave me full access to all four cabin mounting points on the keel. It was a valuable exercise in learning how my machine has been designed and put together. To start with, I'm now getting a feel for the varying structural loadings. 

It hadn't really occurred to me before that when the gyro's on the ground, all the weight is totally differently supported to when it's in the air. As the weight shifts from the wheels to the rotor during takeoff, everything changes dramatically. From the wheels taking all the weight through the axles and the keel, the rotor takes all the weight through the mast: 

In this photo, I've outlined the keel (horizontal) and the mast (vertical). Thinking about all the weight of the machine and two passengers hanging from the few bolts at the top of the mast makes one hope that the bolts are all of the highest quality materials. With a MTOW (maximum take-off weight) of just 556kg, though, it pales into insignificance when compared with the 570,000kg of the A380 Airbus we flew to Singapore in - how does something that heavy get off the ground? 

Eventually I got the mounting bolts replaced with my rubber bung supports and was pleased with the results. They look substantially stronger than the original fittings, and should provide at least as much vibration protection: 

I started putting the rudder pedals back in and then realised that I needed to get back home for a bike outing.