My wife’s uncle had offered some help so I booked him for the afternoon on the idea that I would have everything prepped on the nose gear for his arrival. Of course, everything takes longer than I think (even with me knowing that), and so I was not quite ready. Which begs the question – what were you doing, then?
I started the day with riveting inside the cabin, getting rid of all the clecos. First was the heel guard, taking care to do the rivets that are underneath.
Working forward onto the stiffener and then the brake brackets.
(looking at this picture now, I am wondering if this will have to be undone in order to get the brakes in, I don’t think they will go between the holes grrr)
After that I riveted some of the cabin sides, leaving the holes unriveted that coincided with the interior stiffeners that I would add later.
With having to take pieces out to make room for better access to the rivet gun etc this took longer than I expected so all I really got done before Allen came was to get the nose gear components out and to have a bit of a play.
The nose leg goes inside the bearing support which sits on the firewall. We had to shave a bit off the edges of the support to get it to fit inside but we got a nice fit. For a while I was panicking as the support did not line up with the leg hole and I was thinking something was terribly misdrilled – I had the support in backwards. Oops. Read the plans, Paul.
There are four bolts that go up from the lower support into the bearing block. I drilled up through the pre drilled holes in the support into the blocks, removed then and expanded them with a #3 bit.
The four holes then get tapped for a bolt and since I had never heard of such a thing, Allen provided me the appropriate tool, gave me a lesson and away I went. I don’t remember him telling me to close my eyes while tapping but apparently I did.
There are two pre drilled holes in the blocks that run horizontally but there is no corresponding hole in the firewall for the back hole. To locate the position of the hole I made a template for the side of the block and drilled the holes into it. Then it was simple to position it on the gear leg and drill the hole.
The biggest mystery to me (and everyone else who has walked by the hangar and asked) is the lack of holes in the nose gear fork. Given how critical it is to get the leg in just the right position I would have liked to not rely on my own judgement to get the right location. Fortunately for me, Allen is an engineer and he had marked out the position by the time I had completed some drilling. It took some time to get things clamped in place without moving it but eventually we had it where we thought it was correct.
It took the drill some time to slice through the steel but eventually we had four holes and we trial fit the bolts.
If you look closely you can see that the gear leg twisted a tiny amount during the drilling, despite our best efforts to hold everything in place. It is such a small amount I’m not worried but if I taxi in circles I shall know where to look.
Lastly, just for grins, I put everything back on the firewall.
This almost completes the nose gear! Remaining is to assemble the tyre and then put the bungee cord on the firewall and reinstall the gear leg assembly with the cord. A good day’s work for sure.