REFLECTOR: Moving my roll servo.

[Alex Balic]

I mounted mine directly to the end of the torque tube behind the rear seats
on the floor- didn't loose any leg room at all- saw another installation
that had the servo mounted in the same area, but off to the side of the  end
of the torque tube with a short linkage to the bell crank on the end of the
torque tube.

-----Original Message-----
From: reflector-bounces at tvbf.org [mailto:reflector-bounces at tvbf.org] On
Behalf Of Scott Derrick
Sent: Friday, June 12, 2009 9:56 PM
To: Velocity Aircraft Owners and Builders list
Subject: REFLECTOR: Moving my roll servo.

Yesterday I was finally re-installing the roll servo, which means that
the wings are finally back on and it starting to look like a plane
again! Because the 520 is so close to the firewall, for cg reasons, I
knew it was going to be tight.  With the IO360 there was a plethora of
space.

There turned out to be just enough room on the fire wall with a fairly
straight shot for the linkage arm, maybe 7-8 degrees of slant.  But, the
proximity of the firewall to the engine makes maintenance and inspection
a  truly aerospace like experience.  Now that the plenum is on its
really getting tight back there.

I realized that installing the servo on the firewall in the only spot
left almost completely  blocked  access  to the accessory case from the
pilot side. A similar situation would exist on the copilot side.  In
fact I would have to remove the servo to change the oil filter!  

I played with a couple of ideas about making a quick removal kind of
mount for the servo but after some thought figured that was a bad idea.
Last thing I want is to have a major component of the roll control
system being R&R'd on a regular basis.

I remembered that  somebody had mentioned installing the roll servo
behind the back seat!  Hmm...   I played with that by setting the servo
in various places  and realized  that it would work.   I would loose 
some feet room, but  that back seat  area is the roomiest part of the
whole airplane.

I found some pictures posted by Doug Holab that showed a nice clean
installation of the servo in that area. 

Doug,  is that working out?

Anybody else mount their servo in the back seat area?  Have any
recommendations or gotchas about that?

Another big gain for me in moving it forward is cg. No matter how much I
move forward I'm sure I'm looking at some dead weight in the nose to get
the cg where it needs to be.  But any little bit helps and those servos
are heavy!

Scott  
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