What's new
Van's Air Force

Don't miss anything! Register now for full access to the definitive RV support community.

HAND BRAKE

There was a thread about a father making his RV rudders and brakes hand operated for his son. It was a great story and amazing engineering to make it happen. I did a quick search but could not find it. Maybe someone has it bookmarked.

Good luck.
 
Recently

Wasn't there an amputee that modified with dual hand brakes I saw a thread about here recently?
 
Your choice of hand brake design really is dependent on whether you want the hand brake to completely replace or just supplement the toe brakes. Obviously it's a lot easier from a plumbing perspective to have the hand brake act as a stand-alone braking system and remove the toe brakes.

If we look at it logically, if we can have brakes on two sets of rudder pedals, there's no reason we can't add another set of brake master cylinders to be used by the hand.

Several years ago there was a wonderful fellow in Texas, Jim Newman, who built a Glastar. Jim didn't have full use of his legs and as a result he built hand brakes into the airplane. He commented that most people who flew with him were fearful of the hand brakes until they had taxied the airplane for a few hundred yards, then they seemed to get comfortable with the set up, and after that it simply wasn't an issue. For anybody who has operated a bulldozer, skid-steer loader or zero-turn lawnmower, using hand brakes would be pretty much second nature.

The Glastar has a center tunnel and Jim mounted the hand brake master cylinders vertically, if I recall, with a lever system which replicated the geometry of the rudder pedals, but with longer vertical levers to compensate for our lack of hand/arm strength as compared to our strength/ability to press toe brakes.

Good luck with your modification project!
 
I've flown an A22 Valor a couple of times, and it has the brakes mounted almost like a thrust-reverser lever in front of the throttle. By the time we got to the runway the first time I had it figured out. Now, adjusting back to a high-wing fixed-pitch nosedragger was much harder, after flying nothing but an RV-6 for 10 years :eek:
 
Been close to 200 mph many many times on the bike, and have total faith in that HAND brake!
 
One thing I failed to mention previously... If using hand brakes, a "line lock" style of parking brake is pretty much a necessity since we want to hold the brakes while using our hands to execute the tasks required of us for run-up and pre-takeoff checks.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top