I finally was able to get a few flights on my glassed FW190 A-9 conversion . You may recognize it as the plane early in this thread built by Ramstein44. It went through a few hands before I acquired it. Despite a weight of around 32 lbs, it flies well. The Sierra gear are strong enough to handle the extra weight (and actually contribute to a lot of it).
As I mentioned earlier, there are some issues with putting Sierra gear in the Top Flite. The dihedral on the Top Flite is not scale, and the Sierra gear is built to match up to the scale dihedral on the SisT 190. This means they lean in even further than stock. This causes the axles to not be parallel with the ground and adds even more stress than normal. The toe-out is not easily changed, I had to re-drill some split pin holes to adjust it. With the added angle of the gear the toe-out becomes even more crucial to prevent the gear from tucking under. I also had to add bearings to the wheels due to the added stress caused by the angle.
I put a DLE-55RA in it pulling a Xoar 22x8 prop. I like the 22x10 on my lighter 190, but with the extra weight I thought this one could use some extra thrust. It pulls the 190 around nicely at a good scale pace. Wide open it moves out OK, but still much slower than my 25lb 190 with the 10 pitch. Takeoffs and landings have been no problem, although I think I'll stay away from cross wind days. Even though the gear is very strong, there is only so much it can handle. A harsh ground loop would likely rip it out of the wing. I hoped to have more in-flight photos, but my photographer had some issues and lost the images.
