Time: 6 Hours
My buddy Glen stopped by yesterday to give me a hand at match drilling the gear inboard attach brackets. The inboard end of the gear legs have a 7/16″ hole already drilled in them. You use that hole as a guide to drill the bracket. After that hole is complete you can use the newly created bracket hole to match drill the inboard wear plate. After cleaning up the new holes we placed the gear leg, inboard wear plate, inboard bracket and the outboard wear plate into position and placed the bolt in the holes.
We repeated the process for the other gear leg.
With the legs in place and the bolts hand tightened I started the process of aligning up the legs. You have two jobs when lining up the gear. The first is to make the gear leg faces line up and be square. To do this you run a plumb bob at the very outboard edge on the face/fwd side. Then you run another plumb bob somewhere in the middle, I did 8″ inboard of the first line. Now you can run a taught string on the ground and adjust the legs so all 4 plumb lines hit the string on the ground. This tells you that you have the two faces square.
Now you need to make the squared faces perpendicular to the centerline of the fuselage. To do this I dropped a plumb bob in the tooling hole in the aft end of the fuselage. I then taped two tape measures to the ground and put the V of the two right at the plumb line so that each tape measure was at the 12″ mark. I then took the other end to the outboard gear leg plumb bobs and made those dimensions equal.
The last tweak is to make the space between the outboard edge of the outboard wear plate 3/16″ inboard of the longeron edge.
I then got to drilling, first with the forward 3/8″ hole of the outboard bracket. I placed a bolt in that hole and drilled the aft hole. I used a lot of Boelube and a slow drill speed. Once those two holes are complete I did the inboard 5/16″ holes. For the next two holes I hit the 1/4″ inboard wear plate holes but I had to drill up through the gear weldament and through the wear plate. That wasn’t fun drilling up underneath the fuselage. The last two holes are the 1/4″ wear plate holes on the outboard ends. So that’s 9 holes per gear leg that needed drilling. I repeated the process on the opposite side. That took a couple of hours as I was taking my time to make sure all alignment was kept in place.
That’s where I called it a day in the Hangar. I feel really good at finishing that task. I had been studying the plans and reading several builders blogs to make sure I understood the plans. On to the forward bottom skins.
