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Matt Dralle's RV-8 Project
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Date: 5-22-2009
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Number of Hours: 1.00
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Manual Reference:
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Brief Description: Mounting The Main Landing Gear - Part 01
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What an ordeal... Since the carpet patterns were finally finished, it was time to turn my attention to mounting the main landing gear. So here is, once again, where I deviated from the sequence of events in the plans because I thought I knew better and it turned out to bite me. On the Quick Build version of the RV-8 plans, when you start on the fuselage it says to go to page 5-42 in the manual and start there. This happens to be "Mounting the main landing gear to the fuselage". If you read ahead, though, it says after you've finished that task, that "...the RV-8 sits high on its gear and its probably better to remove the gear at this point to allow better access to the internal areas of the fuselage for installation of wiring, radios, and controls." Well, great, I think I'll just wait until I've finished all of those things to mount the gear, I think to myself. After all, all of the holes are pre-drilled right? Well, turns out, NOT. I also thought that I would be able to simply mount the gear on with the fuselage in the normal upright position, rather than having to flip it upside down (like the manual says). Well, turns out that half of the holes are NOT predrilled and really the only way to get the gear properly mounted and aligned is to flip it upside down, ah... per the plans. Now that I've got probably over 100 lbs of wire, avionics, and auto pilot mounted in the fuselage, however, its not exactly "light" anymore. Moreover, access to the inside of the gear towers where you have to stick your hand into these little tiny access holes, is fairly obscured now by all of the avionics and wiring.
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Fuselage Ready For Gear Mounting
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Fuselage Ready For Gear Mounting
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Fuselage Ready For Gear Mounting
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Copyright © 2008-2024 Matt Dralle. All Rights Reserved.
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