Hello Bill,

What I did because my landing gear was all busted up originally was to replace the stock landing gear with a Hanger 9 60 Fokker DVII gear. I had to do a little bending to get it to fit right and had to modify the bottom of the fuselage a little to make it work, but with a tug here and a push there with a little digging and drilling I made it work. Plus, it was a little longer in length giving it a better scale apperance.

When I modified the landing gear wing to fit with the new landing gear, I got it the same angle the other 3 wings had. I used the bottom wing as a guide and did it by line of site. Another way you could do it is flip the plane on its back with the bottom wing attached, get a small level with a float bubble and put it on the flat part of the bottom wing. Once you have it perfectly level, move the level and put the landing gear wing on, or just adjust the wing and put the level on the bottom landing gear wing. Mark it, and re-check until the bottom wing and landing gear wing are both level.

Because I did it by line of site I was very close. I more went by drawings sitting on the ground to get that near perfect angle. Even though I might have been a tad off, she flies well for a Fokker Dr1. Touchy, climbs like a monkey and wants to bite its own arse when I kick the rudder with my thumb to the right- doing a flat turn. In my maiden video you can see me doing that manouver.

Another thing you could do is after making your marks, is remove the wing and gear, clean all the paint around the wire and re-wire and solder where it broke. The only problem with that is it could break again. GreatPlanes re-made or re-designed the landing gear when the second addition came out. Sure it was a little better, but they didn't use a thicker gauged wire resulting in a still flimsy landing gear.

Just a note:

Take a peak at the rudder where it joins in the fuselage. In the directions they say to use CA hinges for the rudder. DON'T! Make sure you have the Dubro Nylon Hinges and use epoxy to attach them in the rudder and fuselage, I used 3 vertically one on top of the other. The reason is because the CA hinges can't take the stress after a while, resulting in rudder flutter. When that starts to happen it's been known to have the rudder completely tear out the hinges causing the plane to crash.

GreatPlanes never did make that design correction in the manual. They should have, I've had more than one tell me that it happened to them. I'm one of those who gets real angry with a company when any of my planes crash because of a stupid design flaw. I think that's one of the reasons why they pulled the plug on this ARF. Too many complaints on top of production costs, but- that is only my opinion and not fact.

Back to the subject- it's not good that your landing gear wing is swinging in the breeze. I've seen people fly the DR1 having it do that, but if it gets hung up at a funky angle, it will affect flight preformance and will make the plane a little more unstable and could cause it to crash.

From experience I hate a plane that flies good one minute, then changes the next throwing me off. I had a cheap servo reverser in my Extra 260 for the elevator and the vibration threw the servo off a few times resulting instability causing me to kiss the dirt eventually.

I hope I helped, and gave you a few ideas. Congrats on your nice find! You have a very good engine there, I was lucky to get a good engine with mine. All I needed to do is get a new carb and new allen tappets on the rocker arms so I could adjust the valves. The old ones were stripped and I couldn't get the allen key to work anymore. After making those changes my 1983 O.S. 120FS ( Before Surpass) The one that looks like a Saito, ran like it was new again! But I had a different engine for this bird and I took the old 120 out for the newer O.S. 91FX-Ringed.

Pete