Ed_Wischmeyer
Well Known Member
One of the annoyances of the RV-9A is that there's not a lot of room to put stuff in the cockpit around the pilot(s), and things put on the floor of the baggage compartment are not reachable in flight. A remedy for that is the current project.
A ground rule for this project is not drilling any holes in the already flying, already painted airframe. The best solution, of course, would be to install a shelf during construction, a shelf that somebody else had already designed, engineered, and tested -- like maybe the mother ship, or one of the innovative aftermarket companies. (I'll volunteer to beta test...) (I've got the Almost RV-14 seat back modification, which my larger friends love, so the shelf design would ideally fit planes with and without this mod.)
Preliminary measurements indicate that the shelf should be about 17" above the floor of the baggage compartment. That's high enough to be reachable when sitting in the seat and low enough that things won't slide off and hit you in the back of the head in case of an untoward event. Stuff on the shelf would also be easier to load and unload than stuff on the baggage compartment floor. And in a perfect world, the shelf would be strong enough to carry the full weight allowance of the baggage compartment, so that you wouldn't have to remove it unless you needed the volume.
Another requirement is that the shelf not allow small stuff to slide off the edge and get lost. Lastly, the whole assembly has to be installable and removable from the airplane with minimal fuss, whatever that means. (I don't yet have the extended canopy rails installed, a task I'm unwilling to undertake myself with my spinal problems.)
The proposed "solution" is a shelf made of 1/4" plywood, reinforced with Home Depot Aircraft Supply aluminum extrusions around the perimeter with a cross piece for additional support down the middle. There will be a square tube leg at each corner, and a lightweight framework to keep the legs in place.
Not yet addressed are corner gussets for stiffness, and chafing protection so that the shelf unit doesn't wear on the airframe.
I did a search on this site for "shelf" and got an overwhelming number of "matches," sort of like the story of the leprechaun who tied a ribbon around every tree in the forest so that his gold could not be found.
As an aside, I heard an interesting story from an F-22 pilot about his eleven hour combat missions -- four hours to get to the combat zone, then two 90 minute combat sessions with a tanker between them, then four hours back home. The term they use for putting snacks, drinks, piddle packs, etc. in various places around the cockpit is "building a nest."
A ground rule for this project is not drilling any holes in the already flying, already painted airframe. The best solution, of course, would be to install a shelf during construction, a shelf that somebody else had already designed, engineered, and tested -- like maybe the mother ship, or one of the innovative aftermarket companies. (I'll volunteer to beta test...) (I've got the Almost RV-14 seat back modification, which my larger friends love, so the shelf design would ideally fit planes with and without this mod.)
Preliminary measurements indicate that the shelf should be about 17" above the floor of the baggage compartment. That's high enough to be reachable when sitting in the seat and low enough that things won't slide off and hit you in the back of the head in case of an untoward event. Stuff on the shelf would also be easier to load and unload than stuff on the baggage compartment floor. And in a perfect world, the shelf would be strong enough to carry the full weight allowance of the baggage compartment, so that you wouldn't have to remove it unless you needed the volume.
Another requirement is that the shelf not allow small stuff to slide off the edge and get lost. Lastly, the whole assembly has to be installable and removable from the airplane with minimal fuss, whatever that means. (I don't yet have the extended canopy rails installed, a task I'm unwilling to undertake myself with my spinal problems.)
The proposed "solution" is a shelf made of 1/4" plywood, reinforced with Home Depot Aircraft Supply aluminum extrusions around the perimeter with a cross piece for additional support down the middle. There will be a square tube leg at each corner, and a lightweight framework to keep the legs in place.
Not yet addressed are corner gussets for stiffness, and chafing protection so that the shelf unit doesn't wear on the airframe.
I did a search on this site for "shelf" and got an overwhelming number of "matches," sort of like the story of the leprechaun who tied a ribbon around every tree in the forest so that his gold could not be found.
As an aside, I heard an interesting story from an F-22 pilot about his eleven hour combat missions -- four hours to get to the combat zone, then two 90 minute combat sessions with a tanker between them, then four hours back home. The term they use for putting snacks, drinks, piddle packs, etc. in various places around the cockpit is "building a nest."
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