Shoulder Harness Attach

Front Cockpit Shoulder Harness Attach Point

created April 23, 2007

This is the shoulder harness attach point that I fabricated for the passenger cockpit on NX41CC. It follows a detail and concept that I saw in the BPA Newsletter but I tweaked things a bit. The essential part is the clamp on the cabane X-brace wires. I took two hardwood (ash) disks, clamped them together in a fixture and drilled a hole right through the center, through the joining line, on the drill press. Then I rotated the two pieces so that the groove on each disk captured one of the X-brace wires, measured and drilled two through-holes for the legs of a stainless steel U-bolt (hardware store), painted it, put some black electrical tape on the X-brace wires where they crossed, and assembled the whole thing.

On the backside you can see that I used a piece of flat stainless to back the nuts up, then used stainless locking nuts to hold the whole thing together.

My shoulder harnesses are the Y-type with a single attach point, so they work fine with this single point of attachment. Not sure how this would work with individual shoulder harnesses. Oh, and pay no attention to the V-groove that is cut in the top of the wooden disks... when flying solo it is simply used as a sighting point for homing in on my targets ;o)

Here is the setup that Corky had on the airplane originally. A piece of cable was run between tabs at the top attach points of the cabanes and the shoulder harness was clipped to the cable. It may have been just a wee bit more comfortable for the front passenger since it put the apex of the Y a bit farther from the neck, but either setup will work. I'll fly the new setup for a while and see if it obstructs my forward vision or creates any other problems, and I've left the attach tabs for the other setup in place in case I decide to go back to the cable rather than this U-bolt setup.