Trent's RV14 Build: 40B-02 -> 05: Initial Work on the Landing Gear

Work on the landing gear begins by some initial work on the engine mount to install some nutplates, as well as some welding crud cleanup. There was a heap of slag on the insides of the landing gear mounting tubes on the engine mount which needed to be cleaned out.

Smooshed that one!

So much welding slag! I cleaned this out with a stone on the dremel, a file and emory paper.

The landing gear mating surfaces were also cleaned up, and everything got a coat of Boeshield.

Lower Gear Leg Fittings

Next up i made up some drift pins from 3/8" bolts. I then added the lower landing gear weldments into posision, and reamed these. Grease was added onto the inside of the mating parts.

An interesting aside; the plans call for installing the lower gear leg fittings using NAS1306-25 close tolerance bolts. I could not find these anywhere in my bolt inventory. I looked up the number in my hardware book, and it seems these have been replaced by NAS6606 bolts - which i did have!

These were tapped in and torqued to 200 in/lbs! If i keep going like this, i will need a ft/lbs torque wrench soon.

Silicone was added under the washers - presumably to try and keep water out. I also added a bead around the top of the fittings where they met the gear legs.

Reaming the Landing Gear

Next up, i clamped the engine mount on the bench so i could add the gear legs into position and ream these. I painted the top gear leg caps and installed these with silicone. I did not bolt these in place yet.

I noted this little corner of the engine mount - it is a prime place for water and oil and sludge to sit. I might fill this up with proseal at some point.

A gap is left in the silicone to let air out.

Installing Axles

Next up was some nutplates on my nice new powdercoated wheel pant brackets, then i was able to install the axles onto the gear legs. I had to ream out the holes 1/4" on the lower gear fitting as they had been filled with powdercoat. The bolts were torqued to 110 in/lbs, noting that these may have to be removed later when i can properly measure the toe in/out etc.

Torquing these was a bit of a balancing act.

I also re-did the silicone seals after properly cleaning off all the grease so the silicone would stick better.

Inital Measurement of the Axle Alignment

Since i had the gear legs on, i made up the spacer blocks and checked the inital axle alignment. I found the left axle had zero gap, but the right axle had a very large 5/32" gap - using some rudimentary maths, approx 3 degrees of toe out! That was too much according to the plans, but maybe the engine mount needs to be installed - so i checked with Van's support and they told me not to worry about it until later.

Getting Wheely Tired

Next up was to install the tyres onto the rims. I found this YouTube tutorial very helpful in how this is done, and it was fairly straight forward except for the tightening of the bolts holding the wheel halves together. Due to the proximity of the bolt heads to the walls of the brake disc assembly, i was unable to fit my sockets into the space. So i purchased a 7/16" socket from amazon and ground it down. This did the job nicely. I packed the bearings using Aeroshell 22, and my Amazon bearing packer. This worked perfectly!

My standard socket would not fit.

Amazon tyre valve tool worked well.

I had a bunch of left over hardware from the valves on the tubes - a forum question confirmed my hunch that these are not required to be used in this application.