Landing gear « Matt's RV-7 Project

Archive for the ‘Landing gear’ Category

Gearlegs & misc

Sunday, January 13th, 2008

The first thing I did on the airplane this weekend was to finish riveting the tricky rivets that I hadn't been able to finish last time I worked on the subpanel/firewall area. While setting the bottom-most rivet on the starboard side, I screwed up the shop head bigtime and had to drill it out (which I didn't do a great job of either, sigh). I discovered that I also managed to crack the very edge of the dimple – from whacking it with the bucking bar, maybe – and decided to drill out the hole to get rid of the crack and use a bolt instead. So now I have this mystery bolt on my firewall:

I fished the gearlegs out of storage and got to work getting them ready to go on the airplane. These things are about the size of golf clubs, but are made out of solid steel and weigh something like ten pounds each.

Here are the Cleveland wheels and brakes. This stuff is all made of magnesium… light but expensive!

I swapped the pressure and bleed ports on one of the brakes so I'd have one left and one right.

These are the U-403 brake mounting flanges, bolted to the gearlegs. It took forever to get these on here, since I had to grind away all the excess powder coating and then polish the outside of the axles with emery cloth to get the flanges to slide into place. Then I needed to ream the pre-drilled but undersized bolt holes up to 1/4". I'm glad the holes in the gearlegs were already there, or else I'd be taking these things to a machine shop… I looked up the properties of 6150 steel, and it doesn't sound like drilling through an inch of the stuff with hand tools would be a lot of fun.

I swear that two hours elapsed between the last photo and this next one. See, the plans for the wheel/brake installation aren't exactly clear. It took me a couple hours of fiddling, head-scratching, and web-searching to realize that if you follow the instructions as they're written and bolt the U-403 flange to the gearleg first, it's impossible to get the brake mounting plate installed because the bolt is in the way. Of course, it wasn't obvious to me which way around things were supposed to go, so I wasted a lot of time trying to get things to fit the wrong way. An exploded view would have saved me a lot of time here, but oh well.

I can't believe that's all I got done on the airplane all weekend. Blah.

Oh yeah, somebody told me I need to take more big-picture pictures so the casual reader might be able to have half a clue what I'm rambling about, so here you go, a photo of the fuselage… soon to be converted from a metal canoe to a real live honest to goodness airplane fuselage on wheels. I hope.

Posted in Fuselage, Landing gear |

Upgraded tailwheel

Saturday, January 12th, 2008

I finally received the Doug Bell tailwheel fork that I ordered a couple years(!) ago. I was one of the first RV builders to place an order for one of these upgraded forks, but since the one-man production shop's output is limited, I kept giving up my delivery slot to people who were closer to flying than I was. But now that I actually need to get the airplane up on its wheels for good, I told him to go ahead and ship it to me.

Much has been said about the Bell tailwheel before, so I won't repeat it. Suffice to say that it is well made, easy to install, and way ahead of the stock Van's tailwheel when it comes to ground clearance. Not to mention that Doug has a payment policy of "I'll ship it to you so you can try it out, and you can either send it back or send me a check." You don't see that very often.

Posted in Landing gear |

Nuts and tires

Saturday, January 6th, 2007

Avery has a really neat RV jack stand kit that makes it a lot easier to jack up the airplane. It requires you to modify your axle nuts in a manner that I was too lazy to do, so I paid a couple extra bucks to have them send me a pair of wheel nuts that already had the proper holes cut and slots milled into them. All I had to do was rivet the nutplate onto each one.

I also received my tires from Desser Tire today. These are Michelin Aviators with Airstop tubes – much higher quality than the tires Van's supplies (which I deleted from the finish kit). I used these on my last RV and they lasted forever and hardly ever needed airing up, which is a lot more than I can say about the cheapo Van's-supplied tires and tubes that airplane previously had. I figure it's worth it to spend the extra money here.

And for some reason, my cat loves them:

Posted in Landing gear |

Finished empennage attach

Saturday, August 12th, 2006

Today I took the empennage stuff completely apart yet again, deburred and cleaned everything, and primed the various parts that needed it:

I also vacuumed out the tailcone and smoothed and spot-primed a few places where there were scratches and tool marks.

Once the primer was dry (it doesn't take long in Kansas in the summer) I riveted the up elevator stop to the top deck:

I also riveted the forward attach plate and shim to the vertical stabilizer spar:

Scott came by to check out the project and I put him to work bolting the tail back on yet again.

Since all the bolts are in now, I attached the tailwheel. Once I'm done with rigging the control surfaces, I'll take the tail off and put it back in storage, but I should be able to use some shorter bolts and a temporary doubler of some sort to keep the tailwheel fastened to the aft bulkhead.

I installed the F-790 aft elevator pushrod and rigged it so when the elevators are clamped in trail with the horizontal stabilizer, the elevator bellcrank is exactly vertical. This happens when a 3/8" socket placed over the lower bolt head is perfectly centered in the access hole, like so:

Just for grins I also installed the F-789 forward elevator pushrod to see how it would fit. Something seems to be wrong, though… In this photo the elevators, bellcrank, and control sticks are all in their neutral positions, and even with the rod ends backed out as far as I dare, the forward pushrod is way too short. I promise I made it the exact length called out in the plans, so I'm not sure what the story is. It may turn out that I have to re-make that pushrod, which is no big deal since the end fittings are not terribly expensive and the tube stock is available locally – no expensive shipping of long pieces, hooray.

I also spent some time cleaning up the garage, which was a mess. It's still a mess but at least most of the tools are put away now.

Posted in Empennage, Fuselage, Landing gear |