Saturday June 30, 2012 More Work on the Hand Throttle

Richard and I again met at the airport on Saturday the 30th. He brought along the things he had worked on to hopefully get the hand throttle to work. The modified control lever fit very well on the control bar, although it wasn’t very tight. We found that that would probably be better because I could adjust it in flight to be comfortable.
He also produced the bell-crank lever and we put it on the carriage throttle so that the both the hand throttle and the carriage throttle would pull out the throttle cable. We tested the bell-crank and it seemed to work perfectly if only we could find the cable to attach to it. The control bar throttle would override the carriage throttle control, but the carriage control with its lock knob would be used in cruise flight.
The bad news was that 8’ cable that I had which seemed like it was plenty long was not long enough. The cable housing was long enough, but the cable itself was too short. So by trying all possible combinations using the cable we had, we finally gave up for the day and I had my marching orders to find a longer cable. The problem with just getting 11’ of raw cable was that on the control lever end, there had to be the right kind of button (or whatever it is called) to fit into the lever.
So for lack of an 11’ cable, so we couldn’t finish the job. We gave up for the day and I went home discouraged that something this seemingly simple should be such a stumbling block. But later, I found in the LEAF catalog a list of parts for a brake system that allowed for special orders of cable by the foot. I e-mailed Richard and sent a scan of the catalog page. He encouraged me to order the parts, since they didn’t amount to much cash-wise, which I did.