The day was spent getting the right landing gear mount installed in the airplane. This was a pretty slow process of getting the gear installed, checking the fit, and making correction.
The first thing I did was match drill the single bolt hole that holds the landing gear leg to the mount. I used a .311 reamer to match drill the parts.
It was basically impossible to get the gear to nest in the appropriate location so I drilled out the outboard nutplate. This was the main source of interference.
I removed some material on the floor stiffener flange. This picture doesn’t do a great job showing what I did, but I just trimmed back that flange a bit so the gear would fall into that area more easily.
This image shows all the areas I modified. The lower right arrow shows where I had to scallop the gear flange to avoid a rivet on the fuselage. It’s tough to see the modification in the picture, but I basically just carved away the material that was sitting on the shop head of the rivet. The material removal allows those 5 bolts to clamp up flat against the fuselage wall.
After about 5 iterations of trying to get everything to fit up properly, I finally got the gear to nest properly in the fuselage. The gear really make the interior look badass.
Here’s the gear mount sticking out of the fuselage. Looking good!
99 degrees. Things are heating up.
