Thursday, October 09, 2008

Landing Gear parts get drilled out

Here you can see seven of the eighteen holes that had to be drilled, five of which have temporary bolts in them. As usual, this proved to be a time consuming process. First, you need to drop five plumb bobs(two on each leading edge gear and one the tooling hole at the rear center of the aircraft. Then you need to draw a taught string line underneath the fuse and adjust the gear legs as to ensure the front four plumb bobs are in alignment. Next, you get to measure the distance from each outer main gear to the rear plumb bob. The two distances must be within 1/4" of each other or you get to adjust again. All of this gets tweaked into place while setting the outside brackets 3/16" from the lower longeron. Yes, it took awhile, but it's done. After the alignment is set, drill out the bracket holes. Use the best bits you can buy to do the job, Trust me. I ended up using split point titanium bits to get it done. Afterwards, I disassembled and deburred the parts...

No comments: