Sunday November 10, 2024
Gear Leg Fairing Alignment, Intersection Fairings (Landing Gear)
5.0 Hours

I secured the fuel line from the engine-driven fuel pump to the fuel controller with adel clamps to the #4 intake tube.

I decided to work on aligning the gear leg fairings so I could drill the intersection fairings I had gotten from RV Bits in the past. This requires the wheels to be off of the ground and the plane to be leveled. I used my engine hoist and my fuselage dolly to achieve this. Then, I installed the lower cowl, gear leg fairings, and wheel fairings. I also installed the horizontal stabilizer since Van's alignment method has you use it as a reference.

To align the gear leg fairings, you wedge a piece of lumber between the HS and the floor. You measure the distance from center line both at the gear leg and at the HS. Then you run a string from the stick to the gear leg and back to the stick. The string needs to be at the same height at both ends.

This gives you two reference lines and you center the trailing edge of the gear leg fairing between them.

After aligning the top and tightening the hose clamp, I aligned the bottom end.

Then I drilled the top intersection fairing to the cowl, fuselage, and gear leg fairing.

Then, while still ensuring the lower end of the gear leg fairing was aligned, I drilled the lower intersection fairing to the wheel fairing.

The fit on the upper intersections fairings is very good--just need to do a small amount of trimming. However, the lower fairings will need a fair amount of work.

I repeated the whole process on the left side.

Then I got the fuselage back onto the wheels. It looks nice with all of the fairings in place.

While I have the horizontal stab installed, I'll probably work on the fairings for the new rudder as well as removing and installing the new vertical stab fairing.

This work is licensed under Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International