Brief Description: Landing gear mounts and rudder pedals
A nice Sunday afternoon for working on the project. Today was devoted to landing gear mounts--specifically, drilling the seven holes per side that attach the mounts to the fuselage. While I suspect that all of the parts on the RV-7 are considered "critical", it would seem that the landing gear mounts are super critical as they mate with the main spar and all of the landing loads are concentrated there.
The plans call for fitting the mount to the spar and then drilling five holes (pre-drilled through the skin) in the main flange and then drilling through the forward arm into the fuselage. Needless to say, there is a lot of time spent thinking before drilling any holes through the structure, but these caused me a few minutes of angst before I just decided to get the Boelube out and drill.
Aside from a minor mis-fit between the left hand gear mount and the main spar--which should be ok when everything is torqued in place--the drilling went fine and I decided to move on to the rudder pedals.
The builder's manual calls for fitting and drilling the rudder pedal support blocks to the secondary longeron during the earlier phase of construction. Of course I didn't do this and today had to figure out a way to work around the firewall gusset in order to drill the necessary holes. Thank goodness for angle drills!
Measuring gap on forward arm of landing gear mount
