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Rod End Bearing Tool

Mike327

I'm New Here
I was attaching my HS and elevators today. Chapter 11 of the -14A manual had you screw in the rod end bearings to the nutplates which are attached to the aft spar of the HS. Well, this is a tight space so a friend and I came up with a simple tool to ease the process. Some sights mentioned using pliers and wrenches but we tried that and nothing worked well. So we came up with this. You'll need one piece of electrical PVC conduit 1/2" Sched 40. Final length is your discretion, mine was about a foot long. Using electrical conduit made it easy since one end is larger than the other. We cut a 3/8" notch in the small end to fit over the rod end bearing and cut about a 1" length off the wide end. You then slide that 1" length over the notch in the other end. And that's your tool. Then you just screw in the rod end bearing. No risk of marring the bearing or slipping off and denting the aluminum. Hope this helps someone.
 

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Rod end tool

Nice tool. Hope you know that a similar tool is already made and sold by a lot of companies. Cleveland sells a lot of RV 14 specialty tools.
Unless you just wanted to save some money?

RV 6a sold
RV 8a sold
RV 12 sold
RV 14A 140507 flying phase 1
2020 paid
 
Well I thought it was pretty cool. :cool: Thanks for posting. Even though there are specialty tools out there, sometimes I too like the satisfaction of scrounging materials on hand and making my own.
 
Hah, great minds...! It was 4 years ago, yesterday, that I made my rod-end bearing tool. I copied it from another builder's website (Randy Lervold I think).

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Okay, gotta add my version of the rod-end bearing tool that I posted in....1997!

http://home.hiwaay.net/~sbuc/journal/odd-ends.html#bearing%20tool

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Photo was made with a Kodak DC120 which was the first pro-sumer digital camera to market. It boasted a 1.2 megapixel resolution and sent proprietary KDC files to a monster 1 meg (!!) Compact Flash card. This camera was a game changer that allowed me to create a real-time online builder's log....before the word "blog" had been invented. :)

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