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#11
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Any experimental designs without rudder pedals?
Just to be clear - the aspect that interests me
are experimental amateur built designs that attempt to "simplify" aircraft controls. So the Spratt design is the sort of design I'm interested in learning about. We seem to be overlooking the obvious here. Wright Brothers machines didn't have rudder pedals until at least 1916. Long after either of the Wrights were designing them. The controllable rudder was designed and built at Kitty Hawk between Oct 18 and Oct 21, 1902 for the 1902 glider. According to thier notebooks, it was Orville's idea to control the rudder, but Wilbur's idea to incorportae the mechanism into the existing roll controls. This was done by means of two wires that were attached to the rear transverse warping wire on either side of the two rear center wing struts. By moving his hips side to side, the pilot slides the hip cradle which pulls on one of the front wires while slacking the other. The front wires run out to the wingtips parallel to the leading edge, through pulleys on the lower front wingtips, and then up to the trailing edges of the upper wing. As the wire pulls, the lower leading edge and upper trailing edge are compressed toward each other forcing the biplane wingtips to become parallelogram wingtips. Now here's the fun part. The rear wire is passively controlled. It runs from one upper leading edge wingtip down through a pulley on the lower trailing edge wingtip, accross the wing parallel to the trailing edge, through another pulley on the lower trailing edge wingtip, and then up to the the upper leading edge wingtip. The action of warping the wing into a parallelogram increases the distance between the upper leading edge and the lower trailing edge. That pulls on the wire, which compresses the lower leading edge and upper trailing edge, opposite of the other wingtip, ergo, roll control. Now with those two rudder wires attached to that rear warping wire, one gets pulled and the other gets slacked when the wire slides back and forth. Its actually a VERY simple design once you see it. The 1903 and 1904 machines used a similar design, although the actual placement of the parts was a little different. But by 1905, the machine had enough power and stability to handle a seated pilot. A new control system was devised which kept the earlier machines' lever actuated elevator. But for roll and yaw, a second lever was added. The top 8" of the lever was designed to hinge sideways, parallel to the leading edge. Pushing and pulling the new lever fore and aft warped the wings, while hinging the top of the lever right or up controlled the rudder. Sounds kinda complex and goofy, but it worked and kept the pilot's feet free to help hold onto the machine. Harry "bitchin' hip-cradle bruise" Frey |
#12
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Any experimental designs without rudder pedals?
On Oct 23, 5:34*pm, Jim Logajan wrote:
Are there any experimental/homebuilt designs that are roughly analogous to the Ercoupe in not needing rudder pedals? I haven't run across any, but that probably just means I'm not doing a good search job. Obviously all the weight shift ultralight designs would qualify as having no rudder. There are also several fixed wing ultralight designs that have no ailerons. If your looking for simplified design, that is where I would look. The vintage ultralight association seems to be having some trouble with their website at the moment, but it will likely be fixed soon. I believe they are at vula.org |
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