I've been very slowly following the wheel fairing steps, starting with making sure the two parts of each match:
Mating the forward and aft wheel fairing parts
Joint between the forward and aft parts, after sanding to make them fit well
then drilling holes at the right positions to join them:
Wheel fairing parts match-drilled and clecoed together
Getting it aligned properly is a royal pain - they tell you to draw a straight line through the center of the aftmost plane, but it's not a plane at all, it's curved in every direction, and getting it all aligned to even mark a centerline takes some effort:
Wheel fairing with center line drawn through it
Wheel fairing with center line drawn through it
I added shims to the wheels to keep the brackets in place, and added the recommended shim block on top of the tire:
Wheel brackets with shims keeping the distance from the wheel
Tire with spacer block on top
After quite a bit of trimming - mostly of the wheel opening - I got the aft part to fit as it's supposed to:
Right aft wheel fairing in place
The trimming around the tire opening is quite aggressive to get to this point:
Difference in the wheel opening between the original forward part (left) and the trimmed aft part (right)
Getting the two parts to sit in place was also quite a bit of work, which involved bending the bracket arms to keep the lower part of the forward fairing flush with the aft part:
Full right wheel fairing in place
Bottom part of the right wheel fairing not sitting flush between forward and aft parts
I also drilled the future nutplate holes on the bracket, initially just #40 so I can use sphere magnets to find the holes from the outside:
Wheel bracket with nutplate holes pre-drilled
Finally, I test-fit the nose gear brackets to check for any issues with the Beringer wheels (there were none):
Nose gear fork with brackets
Now the real challenge starts - getting the fairing properly aligned in all axes and match-drilling it to the underlying nutplate holes.
No comments:
Post a Comment