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Dans RV8
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Date:  9-4-2006
Number of Hours:  6.00
Manual Reference:  Landing Gear
Brief Description:  Mouting the Landing Gear

We spent six hours and three trips to the hardware store to drill six holes to mount the landing gear.



We had decided to use the Grove Landing Gear. We found that they didn't come with instructions. In the end, the gear mounts just like the Vans gear, but it took a little while to figure that out. Because the Grove gear is made from aluminum, it is a little beefier than Vans. This requires toller mouting blocks. Charles carefully removed skin from the fuselage to allow these mounting blocks to clear.



I took care of drilling the first holes through the mounting blocks. These appear to be hardened steel. I decided to use the drill press - a good choice - to drill the 7/16" holes. The previously unused drill bit just bounced off the steel strap. Off to Ace. I came back with an outrageously expensive drill bit that started out great - cutting through the material like butter. But I quickly overheated the bit, destroying it. Back to Ace. Unfortunately, they didn;t have any more of these bits so I had to settle for an expensive titanium bit. Charles pointed out that I should slow the dirll speed. This worked well. Cutting was slow, but the drill didn't over heat.



We then moved to mounting the gear. Vans suggests using plumb bobs to verify alignment of the gear. We didn't want to make another trip to Ace so we decided to improvise with a laser level. The key simes to be to make sure that the front of the gear legs are in a plane. We set up the laser beam to scintilate over the front of both gear. We moved them fore and aft to get them in the same plane. Then we measured the diagonals to make sure that the plane was square to the fuselage. Vans calls out square to 1/4". We got them to 1/32".



We moved on to dirlling the four remaining mounting holes. After each hole, we again measured the diagonals, which remained square.



We have not figured out how to get the strap end bolts dtrilled - We put that off for another day. Of course, li
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Landing Gear Mounts

Landing Gear Mounts

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Five of Six Mounting Bolts.

Five of Six Mounting Bolts.

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