ORIGINAL: JasonWilliam
Just got to that part of the construction myself. So far, everything about this build has been solid. But the landing gear... its a shame such a stout plane is supported by such flimsy gear.
Gus, can you elaborate a bit on your conversion? Did you somehow bolt the tail wheel to the rudder? What brand landing gear is that in front? Anything else I need to know before attempting?
Thanks!
No problem.
The main gear is (I believe) DuBro "Dural" .40 size gear. it was $14 canadian at the LHS. I got great planes axles, and 1/4-20 nylon bolts to mount the gear to the fuse.
I guessed that the gear should get mounted with the back-end of the gear in line with the former at the front of the wing. So, I pulled out the tank and used 6 pieces of 1/4" square bass-wood and jammed them up (with epoxy) against each other, and against the former. Thus, the fuse was re-inforced to take the gear. It was really fiddly to get the bass-wood in so that it fit snugly from the left-side "fuse doubler" to the right side "fuse doubler", hving to fit it all under the "tank floor". I imagine you can picture in your mind what I did.
Once the fuse was re-inforced I pushed a T-pin into the fuse so that it came up into the F2 Former (i.e. I found the back-end of the main gear). I lined up the gear using the T-pin as a back-stop, and marked where the gear mounting bolts would go. I drilled the holes and tapped them to 1/4-20. To make sure the gear doesn;t moove around too much I also added some lite-ply "gear guides". See the pics.
The tail-wheel was easy. See the pic. I used a sullivan .40 size tail wheel (first I cut the monocote, and re-inforced the bottom of the fuse with lite-ply).
gus