Additional comfort bar glider attachment hole:

Let me start with a statement - "I love my Walkerjet Simon XC plus" but since I always try to build better mouse trap and strive for perfection I look for way to improve things. I thought that there should be 4 attachment positions on the comfort bars so there is more choices to balance the machine with respect to pilot's weight. When you look at the Simon models you will see 3 attachment hole with rather larger space between the first and second hole. Almost like there was one attachment hole missing - see red dot on pic below. So I thought I will drill another hole in the appropriate spot and that will be it....Well that was not the case....

As I was drilling I was assuming that the comfort bar is a stick of aluminum not pipe since if you look into one of the 3 original holes you see that all the area inside of the hole is filled. Well, to make long story short...as I am drilling the drill bit pops through and I realize that the area where I am adding the fourth hole is hollow! Yikes! So this means that the machine and pilot will be suspended just by the two thin walls of the pipe. This  definitely WILL NOT BE SAFE!!!! I thought "Why do I always fiddle with stuff" as this improvement did not need to be done. I have never had any problem to balance the pilot according to his/her weight. OK, but the deed is done so how do I fix this.  After contemplating several ideas I have decided to use following technique:

• I have used piece of duct tape to cover one side of the new hole. 

• I have mixed large amount of Epoxy glue

• I have scooped the glue into a medical syringe 

• I have squeezed all the glue into the comfort bar pipe to fill it

• I have used old drill bit of slightly smaller diameter then the shackle pin dipped in oil and fed it through the hole pushing the excess glue out

• I have repeated this process on the other comfort bar

• The next morning the Epoxy glue was hardened so I have yanked the drill bits out and re-drill the hole to perfect size to fit the shackle pin

IMPORTANT:

I do not suggest that anyone will replicate what I did and try to modify the comfort bar set up in similar way I did. The epoxy was just temporary fix. I have ordered new set of comfort bars shortly after and disposed of the ones above. 

Andre

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