When breaking down the VR in Telluride, I was pulling out the stinger and realized, that there wasn’t the usual rope tension keeping the stinger snug to the keel. I pulled it out 4-5 feet w/o any resistance. I think what happened is I accidentally pinched the pin that holds the rope and bungee which released the tension. Accidentally squeezing this pin mechanism lets the white bungee, and black rope (picture below) fall deep into the stinger because this pin is their anchor point… Note that the vertical pin in the below picture is the one that normally gets pushed to slide the stinger into the keel. The horizontal pin is the same thing, but the pin’s have been shaved down flush with the stinger to allow them to slide into the keel smoothly.
SO, this is how we took apart the Atos VR stinger to get the above bungee and cord reattached to this pin. It’s also the same process when you want to replace the cord or bungee.
Step number one, If your bungee and black cord are still connected, run a rope through them or connect a fish tape to them so that you can let them suck into the stinger to relieve tension, but you can still get them back! My picture below is at the end of the process since I had let them get sucked into the stinger on accident, but you get the point….
Now you can unscrew and remove the endcap on the aft end of the stinger.
The secret step… Under the AIR sticker at the back end of the keel is a hole that you need to get to. When you slide the tail mechanism all the way back, in that hole you’ll see a screw that you need to undo. Here’s a picture of it after we took the sticker off.
After you unscrew that baby, be sure to look for that little tiny cylinder that you can make fall out the back of the stinger. Here’s a picture of that little cylinder next to the screw:
Now that the screw is out, the slider will go forward enough to release the carbon fiber tail piece so it will come up and off the stinger. Shown here:(unscrew the 2 screws on either side of the carbon fiber piece too.):
After that, just continue sliding the internal slider towards the front of the stinger and it’ll come right out too. Here’s what it looks like.
Remember how the ropes are run through the pulley on the left of the slider(Above Picture), and the pulley in the endcap on the back end of the stinger.
Just reverse the process to put this back together. The manual doesn’t give rope length’s or much to go on when re-tying the tail rope to the flaps. The back of the carbon fiber tail piece should rise about 1/4 inch off the stinger before the flaps move from their off position. By “off” i mean resting against the keel. I hope this helps someone. If there are additions, or parts I can explain more, please comment on this blog and ask away. I’ll get back to you.
Many thanks to Jim Yocom for taking me through this process. He’s our local ATOS guru and Competition pilot extrordinaire. Alto thanks to Mark Windsheimer for his expertise on this project too. Here’s a picture of the Atos C I just sold to a new Rigid Pilot, Fred.
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