ORIGINAL: SJN
The eurokit struts with the trailing link are perfect. Man....I wish I had taken the video now.....you arnt going to believe how good this landing was. There is no way ANY kind of landing gear would have helped here.
The problem here looks like that the top and lower skins have not been glued onto the mounts. Its the foam alone that is taking all the beating.
A quick fix might be gluing some triangle stock on the top skin against the ply mounts, and maybe rinning some CA glue between the lower skin, and the mount.....just be carefull it doesn`t run into the foam though
Oh, I'm sure the landing was fine, I have been there, done that with some of these arfs. Perfect landing, gear messed up anyway.
I think, though, the retract plates look like a double layer of lite ply. They use that because they cannot die-cut thicker plywood, so they double up th 1/8" stuff, and the ply they are actually usuing is usually "lite ply", not "aircraft ply", totally different stuff. If you look at most other more expensive jet kits, you will find the parts are bandsawed and sanded from much heavier material like 1/4" ply, because this stuff just does not hold up. But that's up to you. I would definitely replace the material.
Struts and grass don't mix on this scale, I have found. Wire struts are the way to go. If the plane is MUCH larger, struts are fine, but, basically, you have no fore-and-aft shock absorption with just the oleo struts, and that's what you need, more than up-and-down, when flying off of grass. I don't think the struts versus wire would have made a difference, in this case, nor 1/4" plywood, none of that is any good if the mounts are not glued in in the first place!
But save yourself doing this job AGAIN, and make things nice and strong.
Notice BVM uses a breakaway system called "flex plates" because he recognizes the loads incurred here, and that the worst thing to happen, and the hardest thing to repair, is a torn out gear mount, so they make the acutal mounts incredibly strong, then put in a breakaway point that is easy to replace. It's very, very smart.