Phoenix FS

Front and Main landing gear

Big progress on the Undercarriage

We started today with a problem with the front landing gear: the thrust bearings and bush bearings didn't slide smoothly over the welded tube at all. Although there was nothing mentioned in the manual I did see in every Kit Log from other builders that they sanded the paint off the welded tubes where these bearings were placed. It seemed that that was standard practice.

Sanding the tube was quite a bit of work but it worked out well. After that we tried fitting the thrust bearings but they still didnt slide smoothly over the tube! (And its quite important for a thrust bearing that it can rotate freely)

Since sanding down the inner ring of the thrust bearings was not an option in our opinion we sanded the tube more until the thrust rotated smoothly. I think we took of approx 0.2mm where the bearings sit.

Still the bush bearings (the plastic ones had too much friction over the tube, so we decided to sand these out using a drill and double sided tape to which we attached the sandpaper. We did this by starting with a rough grit (80p) and going all the way down to (600p)

Eventually the front landing gear fits in the nose mount well (still with a bit of friction but i hope its not too bad)

In the evening we started on the main landing gear and made some major progression: both wheels are on and seem too rotate properly.

Whilst installing the rear wheel spat brackets (un-bkt-001) the holes did not allign so we had to upsize 1 hole in each bracket (left and right) 0.5mm to fit them.


Next up: making the wheel spats for all 3 wheels


Builders of today:

Vincent

Joey

Pepijn

Tet

This post is from Phoenix FS