Day 39

Our O-rings arrived for our wheel hub assemblies! (A few other back-ordered parts for the wings and elevator as well which was nice)

We started with the nose wheel, which was probably a good thing, because it was the most work. The inner tube has a bent valve stem that is a little tricky getting to fit the wheel hub. We managed to get it to go on though. The trick was assembling the wheel hub halves and using them as leverage to get the valve to move into the correct position and put the locking nut and washer at the base.

The next issue we had was getting the hub bearings on the correct side of the wheel. I put it on the way I felt it would fit better around the valve stem, but then noticed that the manual explicitly calls for the shorter spacer on the one side. The problem was, I didn't catch it until I was trying to mount the wheel to the nose fork. Not wanting to start all over we were able to remove the hub (three bolts) and turn it around to the other side without disassembling the whole thing. Once it was turned around, we then removed the other three bolts and switched them around. But then were the next two issues... First, the hub on the "correct" side has to wrap around the valve stem. (The reason I didn't put it on this side in the first place) We had to place it in the wheel and then use a block of wood and a hammer to pound it around about a 1/4 of an inch to line up with the holes and not hit the valve stem. Then was the next issue, the washers for the other three bolts... The washers are slightly larger than the bolts, and when we put them in, two of them had the larger sides underneath the hub not allowing it to fully seat into the wheel. But not wanting to remove the hub again we were able to pound it out just enough to release the washers and move them so that the hub would fully seat in the wheel. Lastly, we struggled for a moment with the axel bolt. There is a sleave bushing in the hub assembly that was very tight. We were able to apply some grease onto the inside of the bushing and outside of the bolt. With some slight persuasion we were able to get the bolt through the nose fork, two spacers and wheel hub assembly. (We counted ourselves lucky though because later in the day we noticed a post online where people were having to lathe of small portions of their bolts to get it to slide though. That would have been annoying.)

The main wheel hub assemblies went smoother, even with more components. The hubs themselves were pretty simple, Its was the axils that are the work. The bearings have to be packed with grease and getting them bolted to the landing gear takes a little bit of persuasion as well, especially when it comes to getting the back plates to go on. On both sides there was one of the four bolt holes that were slightly off. On the left side we were able to thread the bolt through, but on the right, we had to enlarge the hole slightly to get the bolt to pass through. The left side went together pretty well, and we got the axil bolt to seat great and cotter pin inserted and bent over. The right side however we had to sand a small portion of the landing gear to get the brake caliper to slide smoothly. It truly wasn't much, but had to be done, otherwise the brakes would not have worked on that side.

Once we had all the wheel hubs mounted, we then mounted the engine mount back onto the firewall so that we will be able to set the fuselage down onto the ground. We haven't decided yet, but we may take it back of again when we go to install the motor. We're thinking it might be easier to mount the engine mount to the motor while it's off and the maneuver it onto the firewall, rather than trying to hang the motor onto the engine mount with it already on the firewall. The reason we are considering this is because there are four rubber motor mounts that are a bit of a pain to get installed while the motor is hanging from the engine hoist. We might change our minds though because but that time the parachute cables might be installed and won't want to redo them. We shall see when we get to that point. But either way, at least we can now put the fuselage down on the floor.