Brief Description: Began work on landing gear mount
The mount for the landing gear consists of 3 tubes nested together and attached to the main and rear spars. The nesting requires that the tubes fit snuggly inside each other. I was not able to find an outer tube that had the correct inner and outer diameter off the shelf, so I had to have some machining work done to achieve this. There was a whole fiasco associated with this, and I have been working this on the side for the past few weeks. But in summary, we ended up having to bore inside the 8-inch-long end tube to get the correct diameter. You can only reach so far with a boring bar, so we had to hit the tube from both ends on the lathe, then smooth it a bit in the center. In the end, however, I have all the tubes needed to do the job, so work began. Image 1 shows the right wing after cutting a hole in the main spar web to allow insertion of the mounting tubes. Image 2 shows the end fitting that was fabricated to mounting on the rear spar. It’s a bit of a tricky bend since the rear spar has dihedral and the flanges need to accommodate this. Image 3 shows the same work for the left wing.
