All things related to the landing gear
Building an airplane includes a lot of little steps and very big steps. The big ones are easy to keep track of. Wings, engine, landing gear, etc. Those are hard to miss. However, all the small things could slip thought the cracks if you’re not organized.
So as I’ve gone along, I’ve made a list of things that need to done as I see/think about them. Drilling the gear axels was on that list, so today I drilled them for the big castle nut and cotter pins.
I got the heavy duty round landing gear legs. These are new from Avipro. After production of these, Bob Barrows recommended welding reinforcements to the shock strut.
Mark Goldberg had precut and bent the strips for me, so all that was left to do was the welding.
Not too bad for a novice welder like me!
Here you can see the wiring harness and the vertical power unit. It still looks a bit like spaghetti, but it’s coming together! This was the combined effort of several days in-between waiting for coats of PolyBrush and PolySpray to dry.
I didn’t quite like the hard lines going to the brakes. So I replaced them with flex lines the whole way.
Today I mounted the brake calipers. They’re the Grove 66-152. The manual says to mount them straight ahead to slightly down. As you can see they’re slightly down. After mounting them I would have preferred them to point a little more forward or even slightly up. I emailed Mark Goldberg to ask his opinion and he said they’re fine where they are.
The mounting plates for the brakes had holes for AN 6 bolts. I would have had clearance issues with them that size so I ended up bushing them down to AN 5.
The Bearhawk normally comes with streamlined (airfoil shaped) landing gear struts. Some people have noted that in a severe ground loop the normal strut could collapse. So Mark Goldberg was kind enough to swap those out for these round ones at no additional charge.
These upgraded struts will beef up the landing gear substantially! I will need to put some kind of airfoil fairing on them eventually.
It looks pretty good sitting on it’s own landing gear now! As you can probably see, the landing gear looks rather narrow. This is because it doesn’t have full weight on wheels yet. It will eventually widen the gear an extra 10″ once full weight is on it.
The landing gear went together rather easily. The only problems I ran into was not having beefy enough retaining ring pliers and the rod ends not threading into the piston. So I had to make a quick run to AutoZone to pick up some heavy duty retaining ring pliers. Then I made a trip to Ace Hardware to pick up a tap for the threads. I had never tapped or cleaned up threads before, but EAAVideo.org has great videos for these kinds of things. The threads cleaned up nicely.
Our Grove 66-152 wheels and brakes arrived today! The kids were so excited to help me do the first official assembly of the airplane!!! Everything went together very nicely.
Jessica helped with the left wheel and tire assembly.
Tori helped with the right wheel and tire! Hehe! I didn’t tell them that each one could go on either side! 🙂
Our first order of business was to start ordering parts. We started with the tailwheel. After quite a bit of research, we settled on the Bob Barrows designed Bearhawk tailwheel built by Eric Newton of Bearhawk Tailwheels LLC. http://bhtailwheels.com. Eric was great to do business with. He answered all my questions and creates a flawless product.
Since I’m planning on going with the 8.50 x 6.00 main tires, I decided on the 10″ tailwheel.
Our tailwheel arrived today and Tori was excited to help take it out of the box!