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Rear seat brakes?

What’s your intention? Planning to teach from the rear? I find the rear pedals pretty useless.. you can roll the -8 without any rudder input at all, and heal brakes are not that helpful when the Tailwheel starts coming around.. it’s better to have toe brakes to add rudder and a touch of brakes to keep it straight if you need it. I found that planes with heal brakes tend to have enough rudder authority that you don’t even NEED brakes at all. The only use I see for these are to hold the plane enough for a runup. Other than that, it’s added weight, complexity, and more potential for leaks.. now if you can come up with toe brakes for your -8, then I think you might have something useful for teaching..
 
My intention is to possibly teach my daughter eventually. Also practice flying from the back seat for my own competency before I start teaching. I have an 8a so not worried about the tail dragger stuff for this set up.

More importantly…it’s an experimental and this would be in line with experimenting. Nothing wrong with that in this line of work.
 
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Then perfect! This would be fine I’m sure.. I still find the rear pedals hard to use, they don’t have the same mechanical advantage that the normal pedals do, but for an A, it’ll be ok.
 
Bruce Bohannon who’s one of the transition trainers listed here on VAF has his RV8 setup with full functioning equal leverage and throw rear seat rudder pedals and toe breaks . He removed the sunken foot wells and made the floor flat so his feet can slide. The rear pedals are connected directly to the front pedals with push rods ( bent and gusseted to clear the gear towers { tail dragger} ) ,4 total 2 each side one for each needed function.
 
Beef up those dinky little rods Vans uses. They're too flimsy to get any good rudder feel, and if you get into a thumb wrestling match with an inexperienced front seater I bet you could easily bend one and jam it.
 
Taltruda said:
What’s your intention? Planning to teach from the rear? I find the rear pedals pretty useless.. you can roll the -8 without any rudder input at all, and heal brakes are not that helpful when the Tailwheel starts coming around.. it’s better to have toe brakes to add rudder and a touch of brakes to keep it straight if you need it. I found that planes with heal brakes tend to have enough rudder authority that you don’t even NEED brakes at all. The only use I see for these are to hold the plane enough for a runup. Other than that, it’s added weight, complexity, and more potential for leaks.. now if you can come up with toe brakes for your -8, then I think you might have something useful for teaching..
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Tom,
If you look at the linked photos you will see that Ray Parker designed his own rear rudder pedals, rather than use Vans design. 2nd. the set up is on an 8A. Even on Vans design, the linkage for the 8A rear pedals differ from the 8.
 
VA Maule said:
Bruce Bohannon who’s one of the transition trainers listed here on VAF has his RV8 setup with full functioning equal leverage and throw rear seat rudder pedals and toe breaks . He removed the sunken foot wells and made the floor flat so his feet can slide. The rear pedals are connected directly to the front pedals with push rods ( bent and gusseted to clear the gear towers { tail dragger} ) ,4 total 2 each side one for each needed function.
Click to expand...

I have two very short videos of Bruce's set up. PM me with your email address and I'll send them to you.
 
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