Hi all,
Just a little update. At last, the 403 90deg spring air system showed up on my front door. It took a while but the quality seems decent and dimension-vice it should definitely be up for the job. Total weight of the system not bad either. 1/2" Oleos and 5" Dave Brown wheels also received. So no the fun starts... The plan and documentation available does not tells much about the retract installation on the prototype. Putting things together as specified on the plan does not work out. Wheels will be tilted in the wheel well making fitment of gear doors hard, Wheels does also "crash" into the upper sheeting and the legs are slightly of square to the ground. Not happy.... Luckily I have not glued anything together of the wing construction yet, so there is room for adjustments! As suggested above, a Hurricane retract system from ESM would have addressed several of these issues. The gear setup on the Defiant is pretty similar to the Hurricane...
I decided to roll back and do a CAD model of the initial gear setup:
Starting of doing adjustments things starts to look better. I tilted the bearers slightly forward in the side view and lowered the inner end of the bearers so the leg was parallel to the underside of the wing panel. This placed the centre of the wheel a bit more forward, helping prevent tip-over on landings, it straightened the wheel slightly inside the wheel well and put the leg a bit more square to the ground:
This is better and would work fine if no gear doors are applied. Gear doors are still a challenge, but can be installed if I can accept that they are tilted.
Still not happy, and after some heavy thinking and googling I found this article:
https://www.modelaviation.com/howtolandinggear
This one is god-sent and probably what is needed to address this issue!! I will work further with my CAD model, adjusting the angles and introduce a 5deg "kink" between the leg and retract mechanism. More to come but this solution will remove the need of an expensive Hurricane retract system!