This post is a summary of the work sessions done on the Grove gear alignment and initial installation.
I decided to tackle the Grove landing gear. the grove gear install is similar to the stock gear install. the first task was definitely the easiest, and that was to drill through the wear plates using the attach brackets as drill guides. this was done with very low rpm with lots of boelube on the drill press with a new bit. surprisingly easy, almost like aluminum. the gear are then placed on the inverted fuselage and held in place using the 7/16" bolts just drilled. alignment comes next, and the plans state to drop plumb bobs at two point on each gear leg and then make a straight line through all four points, and adjust until the outer points are equidistant to a centerline point on the tail. the grove gear leading edge are shaped differently so i used a common technique found through VAF.net. I clamped my canopy rails (the straightest, strongest pieces of length laying around) to the outer faces of the wheel attach points of the gear. i then measured at 4 points along the length to ensure the faces where parallel. the channels were parallel to within 1/64" (not including tape measure sag which should have been relatively constant). i also dropped a plumb from the forward, upper bolt hole of the wheel bolt holes on each leg and made each side equidistant to a centerline point on the tail (plumb line through the tooling holes of Wd813 tailwheel mount. i used a long section of aluminum angle and then measured the delta. i got the measurement spot on, just under 3/32" delta vice the plan's 1/4" tolerance. this was a frustratingly iterative process, put mildly. i literally spent hours tweaking this setup, mostly because i was doing this job solo.
