Before anybody asks, yes I worked today. One of the upsides of my job is that there are quite a few days that I get to work from home, and this is one of those days. I've been home working on setting up a couple of new servers, and a majority of the day has been spent installing software. So I've been able to spend a lot of time here catching up the “paperwork” of this build thread, which is good because I know some have thought that I wasn't working very fast (Bruce!!!! Bill!!!!!) . And as I said above, I'm a lot farther along with the build than I am with the posts here. But because of today I've gotten pretty close to being caught up.

The next step is to put in the landing gear mounting area. Picture #1 shows the parts that are needed. Pictures #2 and #3 show the landing gear area. This step is really pretty straight forward. First step is to glue in the the two landing gear anchor blocks. The instructions don't specify what type of glue to use on this step, but this is another place where I would recommend using epoxy. The landing gear on any plane take a beating, but in a trainer it's going to be even worse. Therefore you want these parts firmly attached to the fuselage so they don't pull out on a hard landing. I used 5 minute epoxy to glue these two blocks in place, picture #4 shows them clamped down until the epoxy sets. After the epoxy is set we'll glue the grooved landing gear block in. Look at picture #5 and you can see a little bit of a gap between the grooved block and the fuselage. Sand down the anchor blocks until the grooved block sets flush on them and is flush with fuselage. After I was satisfied with the fit I epoxied it in plane, using weights on top to ensure that they are firmly glued to the anchor blocks. Pictures #7, #8, and #9 show the finished landing gear blocks from the inside of the fuselage.


Pictures
1. Parts needed for landing gear block.
2. Area for landing gear block.
3. Area for landing gear block.
4. Epoxying landing gear anchor blocks in place.
5. Make sure the grooved landing gear block is firmly in contact with fuselage and anchor blocks.
6. Use weights to hold down grooved block while it is being epoxied in place.
7. Finished landing gear block.
8. Finished landing gear block.
9. Finished landing gear block.


Until next time

Ken