Talking about latches....
----- Original Message ----- Yesterday, with the gear down and latched, late
on final with a wind carrying hot gas from a cooling tower of an electric
generator, I had a violent drop with so much negative g that my head bashed
the roof and the gear unlatched and with turbulent air the flaps pushed the
gear up. So I went around to sort things out, but today I have put a little
spring on the latch to keep it in its slot even when it doesn't have gravity
to do it. That experience suggests to me that we should all have a similar
little spring there. To those who say it hasn't happened to them in umpteen
hours I can only say not yet, and surely the rarity of experiencing negative
g when you have the gear down ready to land must account for the rarity of
it h
From: "Fergus Kyle" <VE3LVO@rac.ca>
Subject: Europa-List: Confessions of a doorlatch hacker
>
> Cheers,
> I am so far behind in building, I have taken to making
ancillary
> pieces out of sequence whenever I cannot follow the manual for
environmental
> or other reasons. This applies to those who also must deviate where
possible
> from the manual sequence when necessary.
> DOOR LATCHES
> This applies to hacking the hardware in
> Classic manual, Door Latches, Chap 35, p.35-2, fabricating DL08R&F both
port
> & starboard bolt arms, and,
> XS manual, Door Latches, Chap.33, p. 33-2, same process.
> I made a habit of cutting each 10mm arm 'slightly' oversize so
> that I could later reduce it to exactly the prescribed dimension. HOWEVER,
> in one case I forgot to do that and verrry carefully drilled the requisite
> hole so that it ended up more than the required 7mm from the end (and
didn't
> notice). When it came to assemble, the handle would not happily traverse
to
> full forward (it jambed somewhere). Finding the source of the hesitation
was
> time-consuming and frustrating. It was not easy to see where the jamb
> occurred. While the pivots were the proper distance from each other - one
> was 8mm from its end, because I had forgotten to reduce the rod to the
> proper length. It therefore jambed against the axle barrel when extended
to
> full forward action with the internal handle. Taking it out and reducing
the
> dimension to the required 7mm solved the time-consuming problem.
> Neville and Ivan would smile.
> So if you come across the same problem as you assemble,
remember
> their words. Measure twice. Or, in my case, write yourself memos to
> re-measure before later assembly.
> I did not pen this solely for self-purification. It's just on
> the offchance that there is someone as stupid as I.
> Ferg
> Europa A064
>
>
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