Saturday February 3, 2024
Landing Gear Leg Fairings (Landing Gear)
5.0 Hours

Before I got started today, I looked up the instructions for the RV-14 gear leg fairings and discovered a few tricks. One of those is to drill five holes through the flange of the trailing edges to hold them in their untwisted state rather than using tape. This makes life easier, because it's simple and fast to cleco and uncleco as needed.

I trimmed the upper and lower ends to the lines from the template, but they were still a bit too long.

So I took an extra inch off of the bottom of both of them.

Next, I placed the hinge in one of the fairings where I thought I wanted it to sit, marked lines on the fairing and hinge, and then drilled holes through the fairing.

Then, I clamped one half of the hinge in place and drilled it using the holes in the fairing as a guide.

Then, I installed the other half of the hinge with the pin, as well as the trailing edge clecos, and drilled the other half of the hinge to the fairing.

Unfortunately, my positioning of the hinge was too far aft in such a way that the trailing edge was not drawn together as it should be.

I considered trying to use heat to pull the trailing edge flanges together, but in the end I decided to re-drill all of the holes. I moved the hinge forward about 3/8" to a spot that seemed to pull the trailing edge together. I used the same piece of hinge, just shifting it about 3/4" so the new holes would be far from the old ones. I repeated the whole process with the drilling and things looked much better.

I countersunk the holes and then riveted both sides of the hinge in place. I also trimmed off a lot of the extra trailing edge flange. I will probably remove a bit more, still.

I put it in place on the plane to see how it works and looks. I'm pretty happy with it. I neglected to take a picture, but the trailing edge pieces are flush with each other. The fairing is slightly snug against the landing gear rod. I'll put some UHMW tape on the rod per the instructions to help with that.

Left to do: cut out the notches on the top end for the worm gear clamps, cut the hinge pin to length, trim a bit more from the trailing edge, and fill the holes from my first attempt at drilling. Not to mention, I need to install the hinge on the other fairing.

I also ordered some pre-made intersection fairings today.

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