I'm hoping this forum is not completely dead.

I was at my LHS yesterday and they had the E-flite Diamante 25E for sale for $75 which is about 50% of original price. They had had the plane in stock for a long time and they wanted to move it out. I could not resist, so I bought it.

After searching around I came to realize that part of the problem with this plane has been the problem of landing gears tearing up the fuselage on not-so-hard landings. So, I am now trying to figure out how to strengthen this area.

This first thing I notice is the angle of the landing gear brackets. Any hard landing would create pressure at the front of the brackets due to the angle and snap it off the fuselage. Also, since the brackets are split rather than one piece, a bump or rough area encountered by one of the wheels would not be supported by the other bracket, so it would tend to tear off the one side.

So, the first thing I'm doing is using a landing gear from another plane (that one is in plane heaven) which is a one-piece bracket and set at a 90 degree position rather than angled as noted above.

The next thing I'll do to strengthen the balsa ahead of the piece of plywood used to support the gear is to use fiberglass cloth and epoxying the whole inside area ahead of the landing gear support. Hopefully, this would make it much stronger.

Anyway, I'm going to try the above and see what happens. If the landing gear tears off on not-so-rough landings, then I will reconstruct the whole area with strong plywood, etc as recommended in this forum.

Any comments?