Building up the gear covers.

After a bit of time away from the build, I took some time to start the build up of the inside of this gear door cover. A bit of plywood and balsa seemed to do the trick.

The trick was gently forming all the edges to match the gentle curve of the fiberglass doors. Using a bit of c/a to tack it in positions, I’m using the Hysol to bond it all together.

Should do the trick. I’ll wait a day until it all has a time to cure and give it strength test to see if it all sticks.

Main gear geometry.

After doing several tests with the Hysol, it was time to put it all to work. I’ve built two of these little clamps out of circuit-board material, some K&S tubing and a rod. They grip to the strut using the screw you see in the photo.

Then came the hard part – figuring out the geometry of all this so it actually worked. Here’s a shot of what I ended up with:

Quite a bit of trial and error, but this strut works like a dream. I still have to build up the inside of the doors to a scale thickness, but that’s the easy part and I’ll work on that once the other gear is finished.

Here’s a Quicktime movie of how it all works.

What does this have to do with this build?

GIVE UP?

Well, actually I’m using this vase to help re-shape the main gear doors to match the wing better, as well as help hide the main gear without major surgery. In looking through the other online builds, most have taken these gear doors (which come perfectly flat), and simply mounted them to the gear. Doing this not only looks a bit weird, but means you must make major modifications to the gear mounting – basically, moving the gear another 1/4″ into the wing. That’s cutting the plywood mounting rails, cutting the formers, dropping the gear well, etc.

WAY TOO MUCH WORK.

Why not shape the gear door to the proper shape and take a lot of the work out of it? Using this vase (with wax paper over it) and my heat gun, I can use this sort of like you’d use an English wheel when forming metal. It takes a bit to get used to it, but I’m very happy with the results so far.

I will need to build up the inside of the gear for for strength and scale realism and that should lock it all in place.