March 9th, 2008 - Prepping for the Axles
Woo Hoo! A new step started in this chapter.... This is an exciting one, because when it is completed the plane will have it's own two legs to stand on! Sure it needs 3 but... ya gotta start somewhere. It will be neat to see some tires on this thing. Then it won't look like a fancy boat anymore...
I actually think I will leave the gear off for a while longer so that I can keep the plane on the rotisserie. This was suggested to me by another builder who said that it was easier to build internal panels with the aircraft still rotateable.
Let's get crackin... Actually the start of this will go a bit slowly. I am taking the suggestion of Dennis Oelmann to build up a 10 ply pad at the end of each LG to bolt the axles to. I started by anchoring the gear to the table with one leg up. See below. Then I layed up 10 plies of BID on a piece of wax paper with a 3x3 square drawn in blue marker on the back side. After I had all 10 layers wetted out, i cut to perfect size, scuffed up the gear leg where it would be applied and brushed on a bit of epoxy. I then applied the "Patch" to the leg and peel-plied.
Next weekend, I'll flip the leg over and do the other end. I'll then have to wait for it to cure, but I can then get moving on getting the axles on. I took a look at Rick Maddy's site, becuase he installed the matco brakes that I am using. I think I'll make up the templates like he did so that the axle installation goes smoothly as well. Another good activity.
I moved from here to breaking the seal on a new chapter of work. I have a couple things curing and that means progress. I started the reinforcing layups on the nose gear: Chapter 13 - Step ?? ... hmmm. I don't have that section of the site built out yet.... I need to do that. I have pictures... give me a bit and I'll see if I can't get that chapter stubbed in here so that I can link it...
Not much of a surprize here. I flipped the gear over and did the things that I accomplished last week on the other side. a SHORT OVERSIGHT last week caused me to forget to do the outside of the leg on to AS WELL AS the inside of the leg on the bottom, so I'll be finishing up that 15 minute layup this week. I think I'll mix up some "fast" this week so that the cure happens in a couple hours rather than an overnight... (sigh... unfortunately my epoxy pump is currently setup with slow)
On a more interesting note; I broke the brakes out of storage. I am using the Matco triple puck brakes with considerably more stopping power, rather than the Cleveland brakes specified in the plans. Rick Maddy used these on his plane (now belonging to Tim Wise) and others have reported goodness about them. This is the first departure from plans that I will make of any real size. i don't have a ton of these deviations planned because the more I look at the plans, the more they make sense to me. I seem to understand why things were decided upon in the way that they were. Anyway.... on to the brakes. I am using the Matco WT-51LT... something or other that I don't remember right now.. I disassembled one of them, leaving the other together (just in case what seems obvious to me doesn't later for some reason). Pretty standard disc brake config really. I had to get the brake caliper and disc apart from the rest of the wheel assembly so that I could make the template. For those of you following behind me... the radius you are looking for is the same as the axle base measured from corner to corner. (2.5") So set your compass up at 1.25" and this will go swimmingly. This gave me a piece of birch that looked like the picture below center. A bit of work on the band saw (oh... i need to remember to take the metal blade out of that thing and move back to the woodworking blade now that I have a metal cutting band saw.) and I had what you see below right.
It all fit with the correct gap I was looking for. (left) and I cut a hole in the middle to make alignment easier. (right)
