Engine Mount & Landing Gear

Section 46 is pretty exciting.  The thought of people not confusing your plane with some type of boat, canoe or downhill racer is a real milestone in the project.  I was especially antsy about this, not so much just because I wanted to get it done but I had angst about putting the plane on some type of platform in order to slide the gears in.

Engine Mount

I installed the engine mount way before I was finished with the doors. I vaguely remember I had some more building time but was waiting on some epoxy to cure so did I went ahead and installed the mount. Doing it by myself was doable but in hind site it would of been a lot easier with two people  Match drilling the mount holes wasn't hard but a bit time consuming because you're shooting through steel.  You also have to man handle the mount a bit to get it 'flattened' out enough to line up with all the holes. Next is just bolting it on which was a challenge without another person.  It did require another person though when I had to tighten the bolts to their final torque. Qualifications wasn't an issue as my 11 year old son helped me with that.

Landing Gear

This section is another one in which you have some good choices.  To each their own but I went with Matco Brakes, front axles, axle nut extensions, Plane Around spacers and Dresser Retreads.  I could type it all out and show how things went but that would be a bit of plagiarism since I went off of another build.  Here is what to order and how it all goes together.  Even with that write up there are still a few hours spent staring at the parts.  Once I had it figured out it was pretty easy.  I did replace all the nylon lock nuts with all metal lock nuts, cost maybe $5.

To get the gear struts in you need to raise your project off the ground and put it on something.  I decided the moving workbench I've been using during my entire build would work great.  I summoned three neighbors to come over and as a feat of strength get this onto the workbench.  Took the four of us and a friends wife to push the bench under. It was fairly stable, I wouldn't go dancing around on it but it was high enough to do the trick.

Inserting the gears can be a bit of a bear.  Each weigh about 40 lbs and are an extremely tight fit.  I ended up using gear grease and a lot of turning and pushing to get them up.  Using a screwdriver in the top hole works well to ensure they're in the right position.  Then you have to use a random special drill bit size and bore the hole out more. The size is exactly 7.9mm... you can get one from around $5 and it will probably be the first and last time you ever use this.  This idea is to remove all play in the bolt I suppose.  Should note the plans talk about lining the bit up and then putting it on the drill because of space constraint.  Maybe I ordered a short bit because I was even using my large cordless drill and I had no issues.

The plans also call for you to install the gear dry, drill then pull it out and deburr everything.   Working with steel parts previously on this build I know anytime you take it back apart you run the risk of not getting it together the same way. After I enlarged the hole I deburred with several methods knocking off or sanding any area's of concern.  Then I wiped with a towel and used compressed air to clear it all out.  The bolt is very snug taking a few wacks of a mallet to get it all the way through.  Then just torque it up and you're done.

Mounting the brake assemblies was a bit tricky for me.  Could be that it was 2 am when I was doing this but for whatever reason I was confused on the orientation and actually had them on the wrong sides, which looked strange to me because the brake caliper was in front.  I ended up going to bed, catching the mistake the next day and swapping them.

Mounting of the tire is straight forward as well.  I put the tires together I think the afternoon I got all this stuff and they spent the remaining time in the corner of my garage.  I did take them to the shop though and have them professionally balanced.  Unless you can balance them yourself I would highly suggest taking them somewhere before you put them on the plane.  I fly a 172 with out of balanced tires and you land at anything over 60 knots it shakes quite a bit.

The biggest challenge of this part is actually mounting the axle nut, which I had to do twice for each tire (Will get to that later).  The idea is that your secured axle nut will have a hole drilled through with a cotter pin.  Now you can't drill this hole with the tire mounted and you don't know how much to tighten the nut without the tire on so a bit of a conundrum. Van's solution which works is to put the nut on where you want it and then mark it and count the turns to remove it.  Take the tire off then put the nut back on to that spot and drill the holes. Using the Matco setup and all their spacers makes your entire assemble a bit wide. I'm not sure how common it is but when I drilled my cotter pin holes they actually ended up being notches about the width of the drill bit.

For those that have never put a free spinning tire on, it goes something like this. Take one hand and spin the tire and your other hand tightening the nut until you can feel the resistance.  like this on something there's a bit of a technique on knowing how tight to make it.  You'll want the tire to freely move but at the same time tight enough that there's no lateral movement. Typically you hand tighten the nut as much as you can and then back it off.  However Matco has specific instructions on how to do this with their set up and instead of backing it off, you advance it one nut space.

So in the above photo I installed the wheel pant extension per the plans.  It then occurred to me there was a highly suggested aftermarket piece that greatly reduces the chances of having your wheel pants collapse.  The kit is worth it from a price perspective and can be found at Cleaveland Tools.  The idea behind the kit is a wider base on the extension piece and an AN5 vs AN4 attachment bolt for increased strength.  It even comes with some replacement cotter pins, but they're a bit longer than the plans version and I ended up going through about 3 extra's when installing the wheel a second time. The kit took just over an hour to get installed and a majority of that was wrestling with the axle nut cotter pins.

Kit Contents

Final install

Nose wheel installation went well.  I struggled with one step where you need to compress the bushings enough to install the cap on top.  I tried pushing and pulling and in the end used racket tie downs to get the compression.  Might not be the safest thing so if you do this go with larger tie downs than I did.

Another issue is getting the 26 lb lateral resistance on the nose wheel.  Using a fish scale I was able to measure the resistance.  My first attempt was around 18 lbs.  So I tighten it one notch and now it's 40 lbs...  I assume it will loosing a bit as the cup washers get crushed a bit, so I left it at 40 and made a note to check on final assembly.

Compressing the front

Fits out the garage door.

That's really it for section 46.  In the below picture I took all the tap and plastic off the windows and cleaned everything off.  I'm going to spend some time removing a few scratches and getting the window edges a bit better.  I'll post about that later.