Chapter 9

Landing Gear & Landing Brake

Landing Gear Cover

This was the easiest part of the entire chapter with a couple of exceptions. One I had goofed and forgot to insert my aluminum hardpoints in the bulkheads before glassing. This meant a lot of work to fix this. After that, the cover was easy to assemble. I used 1" thick urethane instead of the the 3/8" foam called for in the plans. The only question that I had was the layout of the scoop. Because the rear part of the scoop is smaller than the forward part, it would have looked silly to "straight line" it. Nat told me to use a flexible ruler to define the shape, this worked out well, and I ended up with a nice looking scoop. The first problem that I had, was I had made my joggles way to "joggly" (deep). So I repaired them by adding dry micro to the the joggle and then compressing duct tape of the appropriate height into the micro, leveling it off and waiting for it to cure. But this led me to my second problem which was I couldn't see the location of the inserts in the bulkhead. I missed two and had to redrill them. Finally, when I was sanding the edges of the cover straight, I got a dumb idea to use the belt sander. The first time the sander touched the edge of cover it shot the cover off the table and across the room. It landed on a corner which flexed a large amount causing a small delamination of the front and back. Since this area is close to where the cutout for the gear will be, I will wait until the gear is mounted so I can determine what I need to fix, and what will get cut away.

I found that after installing the gear very little of my cover got cut away, so I repaired the corner by injecting some epoxy and clamping for cure. Also, I didn't remove enough of the thick foam to allow for the gear inside the box. I ended up sanding through the backside of the cover and removing about 3/8" of the remaining foam. Reglassed (the work area) with a total of 3 plies bid and now the cover fits nicely with about 3/16" clearance for the gear.