a65l

My Feedback: (17)

Sunday. Not the greatest flying weather, but the wind was right down the runway and we had driven 40+ minutes to get to a new field. Out comes the H9 72" Cap 232. Preflight goes fine, but noticed the elevator pull pulls were loose. A couple minutes to take out the slack, wing goes on, fuel goes in and off we go into the wild blue. 5 or so minutes into the flight I come by in a low HS pass and notice much to my shock that the elevators are flutering. Off the throttle, climb to scrub airspeed, turn and I get 'er back on deck safe and sound. Why are my elevators fluttering? Turns out the cables are loose. Again. "Must be clipping crimps" I mutter as I tighten up the cables. Again. Just a turn or two, nothign drastic. Check centering and travel, fuel up and we're off again. This time it's a great flight. As I'm placing the plane back in my pits, I manage to kick the rudder. Hard. One of the rudder pull-pull cables comes flying out the hole in the fuse. I'm angry with myself. I say things my child hears and stores to blurt out while Grandma and Grandpa are here. I take the wing off and discover that the cable is intact, the servo arm is intact, all I've done is pull the clevis off the horn. I breathe a sigh of relief, replace the clevis, have a quick look around inside the fuse. Notice that now the rudder and elevator pull-pulls are loose again. Notice a pattern here? I didn't, so just tightned up the cables again and replaced the wing. Now the engine won't run right, but a few more clicks of idle trim and it's running so off we go. As soon as the plane clears ground, the tailwheel falls off. Not the wheel, actually, but the whole assembly. So I make my flight and thanks to the wind down the runway am able to pull off a beautifull three pointer with very little fwd. speed, saving my rudder from much scraping. As I'm taking the plane bakc to the pits I hear something rattling around in teh fuselage. Being the inquisitive type I pull the wing off to see what it is, but it escapes me and falls into the grass. No matter because after a short investigation I find......

The elevator servo is missing the fwd two mounting screws.
Because of the misssing screws, the servo has been rocking and has since broken the rear servo rail loose. The only thing holding the elevator servo in place is the screws in the rudder servo.

It really didn't sink in untill much later on how lucky I had gotten to still have this airplane. I really hope I'm not using up all my luck... I might really need it some day.


Andy

CGRetired

My Feedback: (1)

You can fly it without a rudder, but loose the elevator and you're now in for the flight of your life!!! I had something similar happen to me but I noticed a subtle change.. but with me it was the elevator which slowly lost authority. Like you, I kept flying, but on the third flight, I tried a simple loop and it went up a few degrees but that was it. Now, I begun to get a tad concerned so I opted to land, went around and came in. Upon trying to flair, nothing happened, the nose would move only a bit so I slowed and slowed until it was just about floating a few inches above the ground and only about 20 mph (guessing at speed) and then killed the throttle. It just dropped to the ground and rolled to a stop. After looking it over, I noted that the same thing had happened to me, only the screws holding the servo in place were loose and just popped out.

I was fairly new at the sport and didn't realize that I should have added a few drops of CA to the servo mount holes to strengthen them. I guess I just never actually tightened the elevator servo mounting screws and had them in just finger tight and as the screws backed out, I assume from vibration, the servo slowly rocked out of the socket until it was ineffective, or just about ineffective. After that last landing, I noticed that the elevator was moving only about an eighth of an inch or so and was very squishy.. for lack of a better term so I removed the wing and saw the servo just swinging there being held in place by one loose rear servo screw. The other three were sitting there in the bottom of the fuselage.

We were both lucky!!!

DS.

(that was on my Tiger 60, by the way)

rjm1982

Andy, I would have been mad at you the next time you came to fentress if you had dumped that...u know I want to see that thing fly...not only is it big and pretty, but its not red and white...