dabigboy

Howdy all,

I just finished restoring my Tiger 2 in late '04. Among other changes, I converted it from tricycle to taildragger configuration. I've got probably a dozen or so flights on it since the restoration, a couple of hard landings early but since then all landings have been pretty smooth. However, the wire gear are starting to become loose in the mounts. I'm using a setup similar to the original tricycle gear.......I made some new mounting blocks from birch and glued them in front of the spar to move the gear forward, and drilled 1/8" holes to put the wire gear in.

The blocks were made by laminating two 1/8" slabs of birch with epoxy. They were then epoxied onto the front of the spar, between two ribs, oriented similarly to the original blocks (I also reinforced the ribs with 1/8" birch....the mounts seem to be holding up well).

Thing is, I didn't originally build this plane, so I don't know exactly how the original mounting blocks were installed. They appear to be 1/4" hard wood of some sort, glued onto tbe back of the spar, between two reinforced ribs. The gear never loosened up inside the mounts at all, and this is an 8+ year old plane. Is there some sort of reinforcement you're supposed to do after drilling the holes for the gear? The gear originally slid into my new mounts nice and tight, but now have a bit of play. I'm afraid it's only going to get worse the more I fly the plane.

One possibility is that my original drilling job was sloppy and the part of the gear that slides into the block was only being supported in a few places, thus bearing more than normal loads, and flattening out after some use.

I'm thinking of getting some metal tubing with 1/8" inner diameter and epoxying it into the blocks. This would eliminate metal-to-wood contact of seperate parts.

Thoughts? Suggestions?

-Matt Bailey