I am putting my Tower Trainer 60 on my Goldberg Superfloats. I am using two dural landing gears attached to the floats on the factory original location. I noticed the fuse bottom is 1/8" ply and the landing gear lines up with the main bulkheads in the fuselage, front and rear. My question is do I need to double the ply between the fuse and the aluminum gear. My guess is no, but I'm not a pro at this.........yet....haha

Only if you don't want it to break

Yep. Put in at least a 3/4" wide strip of 1/4" ply, extending all the way to the sides of the fuselage. Having the 1/4" ply reinforcement as wide as the landing gear is better. Epoxy it in, and be sure the epoxy is glommed up on the ends as well as the major face that touches the bottom.

You'll be happier if you drill it a little large and use Tee-nuts. 6-32 screws are usually about right.

Not to hijack this thread, but I'm looking to put my Alpha 40 trainer on floats this winter. One thing I'm confused about is it looks like the existing landing gear block is not in a good location. By that I mean that the main gear, while conventionally located for a trainer, appears to be not in a good location for float installment. It's not far enough forward nor is it far enough aft. It looks like I need would need to actually install 2 plywood plywood blocks, one further forward and one further aft if I want to put floats on.

I'm getting all of this from the pictures I've seen. Do I actually need to install two landing blocks, or is there anyway to the existing one in conjunction with a new one?

Thanks.

It's very possible that you will need two. As far as WHERE they should go, I would say a lot will depend on the brand of floats you use. In some cases it will be easier to modify the plane, and in others, easier to modify the floats

Heeeeey I think as time goes by "I like your principles Minn".....comprehensive answers are what I like the most.!!
Stay well Mike
Nothing more to add.

Johnnie

Most of the weight goes .....duh......on the step. So the main gear should be near there, about where the mains are if you have trike gear. You don't want to put one set of struts waaaay back and one set waaaay forward because it will put a large bending load in the floats. And if the floats fracture it will likely be at the step because...that's a NOTCH! (that's where MY floats always break, anyway.

Heres an alpha 40 (I think). My Tower 60 turned out nice. I located the dural gears where they needed to go. I cut the balsa sheeting from the fuse bottom exposing the rear bulkhead and plywood side edges. I built a 1/4" ply panel from 1/8" mahogony ply with blind nuts installed and epoxied it to the fuse frame flush with the bottom. Its waiting to be covered. For the front gear, i simply removed the battery/rec. tray and epoxied an 1/8" ply doubler that extends to the sides to the existing 1/8" ply bottom and installed blind nuts. If that wont hold I dont know what will.