Anybody out there have problems with the gear plate breaking free on hard landings?


Anybody have a pic of a mod to fix it? I'm currently making an [I] shaped plywood mount so I can put some tristock on the bottom.

Hi Sweetpea01:

I had a lot of troubles with the gear plate of my Eclipse [&o]. I’ve tried different solutions and the best that I found was an “H” shape [8D].

I don’t have a picture now, so I did a drawing of it (I mean a really bad drawing of it [:@]). I hope that will help you.

I used Midwest PlyWood (Thickness: 1/8" (3.0mm)) for the new gear plate and only Devcon 30-Minute to fix it.

Until now I proved that it works much better than the original solution .

Saludos !

That's similar to what I was creating.

H shaped is more toward what I made.

I put tristock across the whole top on each fuse side.

On the bottom I was going to put small tristock on each (4) outer edges of the H and reinstall the 2 half horshoe formers and possibly add two more. I didn't want to make a solid former across so the pipe would fit and to save some weight. I put the plate flush with the top layer of balsa since it really didn't do anything anyway. Gives me maybe one less mm of ground clearance though. The tough thing about the design is that there is nothing to glue to directly under the plate because thats where the gear go. And there is no top former for bouncing up support


I also sanded up the fuse sides and used Hysol epoxy (loctite) to install the plate. Hopefully it holds

What I did on mine (in addition to the "H" brackets) was to take a strip of carbon mat (.5oz) and run it inside the fuse down the fuselage side and across the gear plate area and up the other side. Use thin laminating epoxy and it adds very little weight. Also, I drilled and installed a couple of 1/8" dowel pegs through the fuselage side and into the edges of the gear plate. These should be installed prior to finishing the plane unless you are going to sand and touch up paint the gear area.

My plane was an arf and already had the carbon strip......it cracked at the 90 degree bend right off the bat. I figured because there is no up support. i.e.........when you land all the stress is pushing the plate up, and the strip being on the top is desgined for a downward stress. And they couldn't put the strip on the bottom because of the gear cutout.

I like the peg idea though.