> The shoulder harness fastening points were in the reinforced hat shelf > behind the seats. This was in the KR Newsletter years ago and also I > believe > put out by Rand as the best way. Mine were built to this information.
I've never been a big fan of that shoulder belt design. Other than the fact that it doesn't appear to be strong enough (and Bob's experience would support that), it also results in a sharp angle of the belt between the pilot's shoulders and the attach points only a few inches to the rear. The taller the pilot, the sharper the angle. If I remember correctly, 5 degrees is considered to be the max angle to minimize spinal compression in a forward impact. For those two reasons, I ran my shoulder belt attach points to the back of the plane and wrapped them around the horizontal stabilizer spar, a piece that few could argue isn't well supported. I haven't done an analysis on this, but on the face of it, there's a lot more wood and triangulation going on back there, and I also have an aluminum angle reinforcing that spar to the fuselage longerons. I got this idea from Jim Hill's installation, and this method was also bantered about in some of the older KR Newsletters. I was originally concerned that all of those cables (6 counting tailwheel and rudder) would compromise antenna performance, but I have no problem talking and hearing up to 150 miles on my radio, so apparently I'm OK there. The shoulder belt attach instructions from RR are about 2/3 of the way down http://home.hiwaay.net/~langford/misc.html if anybody wants to see them. You'll notice the tremendous angle from pilot's shoulder to attach points, give the few inches of difference. I don't know that I have any photos of my installation but the concept is pretty simple. I had the aft deck off yesterday and would have taken pictures if I'd known I needed them. Next time I take the aft deck off I'll do that and post them... Mark Langford N56ML "at" hiwaay.net website at http://www.N56ML.com --------------------------------------------------------
