Landing Gear !

This weekend was a huge weekend for the project.  I finished up all the misc items on the firewall, mounted and torqued the engine mount, worked on the wheels and brakes, then finally put the plane up on its gear.  I will say that working with the brakes and wheels wasn’t at all straight forward and I was a little surprised with how difficult it ended up.  I got through it though and things are looking good.   I will need to remove the wheels to final torque the brakes though, and probably repack the bearings, but for now she is mobile..  The plane is definitely a lot taller than I though it would be.   Looks huge in my garage ! 

First thing I did was remove the bottom hinge from the firewall, which I replaced with a plate..  I am planning on using screws or camlocs for the underside of the cowling due to many builders having the hinges loose eyelets, I don’t have a good picture of the plate, but I am sure down the road a good one will show up.   I also started working on the wheel pant mounting flange which connects through the break assembly.   I had to remove quite a bit of material to allow the brake pins to fit past the flange.  Also, I would recommend doing a complete wheel install before the gear is on the plane.  Right down to drilling the retaining nut hole through the axle..  This was a bit hard to do while the gear was on the plane.

Mounting the gear was a no brainer, just had to wrestle with the engine mount a bit first and then carefully line up the hole so I could drill out the undersized hole in the engine mount.  The rear hole is slightly undersized so that you can get a really smooth fit for the single bolt that holds on the landing gear..  Yes only one bolt per side holds these puppies on..

The tail wheel was piece of cake since I had pretty much finished it months ago.  Sorry for lack of photos and description.  There was a lot more work to this than I show here, I just wanted to get through with it and am now glad its done.