Parking Brake

I installed the parking brake today. Nothing too big to note, a lot of people have already covered installing the PVPV-D, so enjoy the photo:

PVPV-D Parking Brake Bracket

I want to put a parking brake into the plane. I looked around what others were doing and the Matco PVPV parking brake seems to be pretty standard. So much so that airward sells a bracket for the brake. I have no issues with the airward bracket, but I do have a mill in the basement and this seems like a pretty low stress project for when it is too cold to work in the shop.

I started with building a solidworks model of the PVPV-D from the mechanical drawings. The drawings call out that you need 27.5 degrees of deflection on each side of the "up" position to go from on to off. I built the axial limits on the model stop at 30 degrees on each side.






From there I designed a bracket around the PVPV-D that will:

• Securely mount the valve to the firewall
• Allow the replacement of the valve
• Give 30 degree end stops on the arm travel
• Hold the control cable

After the design stage I moved over to the mill and faced a hunk of aluminum. I have a TIG welder so I plan to build this in 2 pieces so I don't have to hog out 3 square inches of aluminum. I drilled and tapped the parking PVPV-D mounting holes with a 10-32 tap.

 

I am still waiting on my fuselage kit to arrive so for the time being I only placed the two valve mounting holes, and none of the firewall mount holes.

 

At this stage I forgot to keep on taking photos. The second piece I machined was the vertical bracket that provides the end stops and cable holding. I need to purchase a cable yet, so for now, I am going to keep the project in this state until I get the rest of the pieces. I still have a lot of metal to get rid of, but from a proof of concept, the bracket is working.