We are going to jump around a little bit on the finish. This is the order in which I did things. It made it easier for me. Right now the model has the majority of everything done. The engine was installed then removed for easier handling on the bench, the servos in the tail are all done. The rudder is still not attached nor the rudder cables setup. I usually leave the rudder cables to a last minute thing. No specific reason. Right now we are ready to do the landing gear. This means that sitting the model on the table will be fairly easy now and we don’t need a stand of some sort to finish up the details.

The aluminum landing gear that comes with the model is pretty heavy. If you wanted to you could replace this gear some Carbon Fiber Bolly gear and probably save 5-6oz. The wheels and wheel pants supplied with the kit are pretty large. The pants are heavy do to their size yet the wheels are very light. This model was setup to work on the rougher grass fields around the country. The wheels and pants work well together and fit.

Landing gear install was a pretty easy task. This is where the quality of the model parts suffers a little bit. It’s not a bad thing but the gear could be aluminum and much lighter than they are. They could also have been finished to some extent. From the looks of the gear they came off a plasma type cutter and were stuck right in the box. The edges are not cleaned up in anyway. Please be careful with this edge mine were extremely sharp with a burr from the cutting process on the edge of the aluminum. I took mine to a bench grinder with a wire wheel and this cleaned them up a little. Be careful the wire wheel can eat of the aluminum if you are not careful. The goal was to get it to a point that I could use some sand paper. Then I sanded with some 100grit then down to some 320grit paper. I will likely paint the gear legs white as they will look good on the model. For now I need to get them bolted in the model. Another notable was the printed lettering on the raw metal stock before it was cut is still on the gear legs. This is shown in one of the photos below. Acetone made short work of this lettering. Once I had the edges all rounded off and smoothed over it time to get the gear in the model and bolted in place.

The gear plate in the fuse came pre-drilled and 4mm blind nuts or “T” nuts were installed on the bottom ply plate. The way this landing gear design is the strut is sandwiched between two plywood plates. The bolts just keep the strut from sliding out of the slot. When bolted all together this creates a very strong structure. The landing gear struts are pushed into the slots about as far as they will go. Mark the locations from inside the canopy area of the model using a Fine tip Sharpie marker.

Next remove the gear strut and mark it so you know which side it was. This is done just in case the right and left gear plate holes don’t match up. It’s easier to mate the system up now and know which are the Left and the Right. For this I used a regular Sharpie marker as shown. As you can see I marked in a location that is hidden when the gear are bolted in place. Another neat trick is using a sharpie marker on the strut before painting like this will mean that the paint will not bond properly over the marks. So the marks will be permanently on the strut in a hidden spot. This will keep them from getting mixed up down the line. Another little trick in using the sharpie marker on the strut is to mark which model it goes to or maybe a date. This way you if you have more than one of the same models like I do with some of my 2M models you can keep the parts separated and know instantly which model they go to. When I was a kid one of my mentors as a modeler was Lee DeMary in Denver Colorado. I always remember Lee putting the test flown date on his model. I can still vividly see the marking he would put on the fin or rudder. I always thought this was a neat thing to do.

Back to the landing gear install. Once the holes for the gear bolts are marked I used a #10 drill bit to drill the holes. These holes are a little bit oversized for what is needed on the 4mm bolts but I wanted to make sure that I had no issues installing the bolts. Besides the plywood box that the strut sits in doesn’t allow for much movement if any. The holes were drilled then a Counter sink bit was used to clean up both sides of the holes. A quick bump or two will de-burr the edge of the holes and make a nice clean surface. Landing gear struts are then bolted in place using the supplied 4mm Phillips head bolts and flat washers. I installed them once to make sure all was correctly fit then I removed and added thread lock to each bolt, one a t a time. The gear struts are now installed.

Moving to the tail wheel installation is next on the hit list. I don’t like the tail wheel bracket supplied with the model. The wheel is good and light but the bracket is a bit cheesy and I make my own. The tail wheel bracket furnished with the kit attaches the tiller arm of the bracket to the rudder in a “hard” connection. So every bump and chuck hole you hit will translate directly to the rudder. For years I used fuel tubing to connect the tiller of the tail wheel to the rudder. This would give some shock absorber action yet the wheel would move semi “OK”. Today I just install a pin in the bottom of the rudder and then use rubber bands to connect the tiller to the rudder. This way the rubber bands are tight enough o keep the wheel moving with the rudder, yet if you hit a clump of grass there is some shock protection. We don’t want those impact loads going to our rudder hinges, or the back through the cables to the rudder servo. The rubber band isolates the wheel from the rudder just enough. It’s easy to replace and works perfect. Plus Peter Goldsmith always told me that a model airplane has to have a rubber band in it. That’s the rules. So this is my fulfillment of that unwritten rule. Since I make my own tail wheel assemblies I keep a spare or two in my box all the time for a quick change out. The model has a plywood plate installed at the rear of the fuse for the tail wheel. I drilled and used a tap to thread it for a 1/4-20 SAE Bolt. My homemade tail wheel assembly uses a ¼-20 nylon bolt as its attachment device and also the bearing for the wire strut. Drill the hole and run the tap in slowly. Once the threads are cut you can use some thin CA, again the Bob Smith Blue is the best here. Soak the threads with thin CA. Don’t use any kicker we want the wood to absorb this CA and make the wood very hard and the threads durable. After about 5-10mins the CA is good and cured it helps to run the tap through the threads one more time just in case the CA clogged up the threads. Now the tail wheel just bolts in place by hand. It doesn't need to be super tight. I will show some better photos of this next post I need to get some good photos of it.

The rudder of the model is still not installed but we will get to it very soon. I want to get the wheels and pants installed on the struts then its time to do the rudder hinges and finish of up the tail wheel install.