Tonight was a milestone in that it was the first time the fuselage has rested on the main wheels … ever!

I lowered the fuselage dolly platform to get the fuselage as low as possible to slide it aft on the fuselage dolly and thus get the main gear wheels on the floor.

Forgive the camera angles, but I was backed up all the way in the corner and trying to get as wide angle of a shot as I could!

After I got the fuselage set so I could access the CL on the belly, I started attaching straight edges, running strings and plumb bobs, etc. to double check the toe-in on each side.  As I suspected, I jacked up the toe-in pretty good after I had set them correctly from the first go around with the gear in the air.

When I flipped the fuselage over I had double-checked the toe-in and it seemed to be either negative (wheels pointing out) or not enough.  So when I mounted the wheels I sanded down the mounting pads to reset the toe-ins correctly.  Of course, as often is the case, I should have left well enough alone!

With access to the CL mark on the belly this evening, I could actually determine the CL to double check my toe-in measurements.  After it was all said & done this evening, I confirmed that my left wheel assembly is mounted approximately .08″ farther outboard than my right, which is not enough for me to worry about any further.

However, my toe-in is much more than it technically should be with each side a hair over 0.3″.  I figure that per plans the max you want to be at is 0.45″ combined, and I’m sitting just under 0.65″ combined.  However, since my plane will have a bigger engine and weigh a couple hundred pounds more than what Burt was originally planning these birds to weigh in at, I’m not going to make something not-so-great even worse by mucking about with it.  At least not right now.  I’ll wait until I do my high speed taxi tests to see how my tire wear is progressing & then adjust fire from there.

Tomorrow I’ll get the fuselage dolly out from under the front of the fuselage, lower the nose gear and play around with that a bit and grab some pics for prosperity sake.  I’ll then start working on prepping the wheel pants for install.

I started off today by test fitting the right heat shield onto the gear leg.   The foam of the lower gear fairing extended out enough to make it impossible to mount the heat shield in its correct position.

I marked the perimeter of the heat shield onto the lower gear leg in preparation to cut the glass & foam away from the lower gear leg.

I then used the Fein saw to cut away the glass & foam away from the lower gear leg to allow the heat shield to fit correctly in place.

Here’s a shot of the trimmed lower right gear leg.

I then remounted the right gear heat shield, which fit fine.  I held the AN4-22A bolts in place with spring clamps.

I then repeated this process on the left side to clear the lower gear leg glass & foam (and micro) to allow the left heat shield to fit correctly.

I ran a line down the fuselage CL to double check the toe-in, and even sanded the gear axle mount pads, but after dialing them in as best I could I realized that I was about as close as I was going to get at this point.  I’ll do some final checks with the fuselage actually sitting on the ground.

After messing about with the toe-in and dialing it in as best possible, I then mounted the axle, brake mount assembly and the heat shield onto the right gear leg.

I then mounted the right brake rotor and brake caliper assembly.

Here’s an inside view of the right brake caliper assembly.

I then installed the wheel & tire onto the right side gear leg.

Here’s another shot of the right wheel installed.

After installed the right wheel, I installed the left axle, heat shield and brake mount assembly.  Unfortunately, after tightening up all the nuts on the AN4-22A bolts and then attempting to mount the rotor & brake caliper assembly I realized that I had mounted the brake mount assembly upside down… doh!

This is how it should look!

I then mounted the left brake rotor & brake caliper assembly.

Here is a shot that I’ve been wanting to take for a long time: both wheels mounted!

I then mounted the 9.5″ braided stainless steel Stratoflex brake lines that will connect the brake caliper to the stainless steel brake line tubing.

Here’s an inside view of the right (top) and left (bottom) braided stainless steel Stratoflex brake lines.

I then mounted the wheel axle nut sleeves to both Matco axles. These are sold by Van’s Aircraft for mounting the outboard side of the wheel pants.

With the gear fairings finished and the wheels now mounted, I will start the process of installing the wheel pants.  After I get the wheel pants installed, I’ll then flip the fuselage back over, finalize installing the brake lines.  Finally, I’ll then work on the RAM air scoop and aft fuselage extension over the hell hole area.

I started out this morning by whipping up some thick micro and applied it to the trough along the TE on both gear fairings.  I then peel plied the micro with 1″ wide peel ply tape.

Later on in the afternoon I razor trimmed the TE on each side.  Then in evening I pulled all the peel ply both off the cured TE micro and the off the topside UNI overlap onto the lower UNI skin.  I then sanded the aft fairing TE on each side.

After I finished up with the gear fairing, I rounded up all the wheel pant components to have them on hand as I start moving towards installing them.

I’ll be gone most of the day tomorrow (Friday) so I won’t be working on the plane, and Saturday will be a bit busy as well.  I will be attempting to check the Toe-in Saturday, Sunday at the latest.

I didn’t get a lot done today on the plane build, but I did spend a couple of hours cleaning up the gear fairing layups from last night.

I started by pulling the 2″ wide peel ply off the LE of both sides of the fairings.  I cleaned up the peel ply boogers and then cleaned up the top & bottom fairing edges by trimming away the excess glass with the Fein saw.  I then cut the glass on the LE with the Fein saw using the protective duct tape edge as a guide.  I didn’t take any pics of this until after I finished taping the cut line along the fairing TE with blue painters tape.  I then cut both TE edges and cleaned up the LEs & TEs with my sanding board.

Here’s a shot of left side gear fairing LE.  You can see all the other edges have been trimmed & cleaned up as well.

A shot of the gear fairings after getting trimmed & cleaned up.

I then started planning the belly scoop for my RAM air, much along the line as what James Redmon has on his Berkut 13.

I have a lot of errands to take care of tomorrow, so I probably won’t get much done beyond pondering my brake line interconnect between the long aluminum lines and the 9.5″ braided stainless steel lines at the brake calipers.

Well, at least the underside of them.

I started out by prepping the right gear leg for attaching the gear fairing foam pieces.

I figured I would snap a couple of shots of the gear fairing foam pieces ready to install.

I then slathered up the right gear leg with micro as I did the left site and attached all the foam fairing pieces to the gear leg.

Here’s another shot of the right side gear fairing.

I then cut 2 pieces of UNI at a 30° bias for each side, for a total of 4 pieces of UNI each measuring 11″ wide x 32″ long.

After getting all the UNI cut I mixed up some micro using MGS 335 and applied it to the bottom surface of the left gear fairing.

I then laid up 2 plies of UNI, with the 30° bias going in opposite directions.

I then micro’d the surface & laid up 2-plies of UNI on the bottom side of the right gear fairing.

Here are a couple of shots of the glassed bottom side of the gear fairings.  Again, I’ll layup the top side of each gear fairing after I flip the fuselage over back upright.

I’ve also been meaning to take a pic of these.  They’re end caps for the Matco axles from VANs aircraft that have a nutplate in the end to allow for mounting the outboard side of the wheel pants.  This eliminates the requirement to drill & tap the end of the axle, which with Matco axels can be a little problematic.

Tomorrow I’ll clean up the gear fairing layups & then assess the bottom fuselage extension.

As you can see, and as I predicted, I didn’t get anything done on the plane yesterday since my fellow Long-EZ builder & great friend Marco (prolific writer of the awesome blog “What have I gotten myself into!”) stopped by late yesterday afternoon.  I showed him around the shop and gave him the tour & update on my project, which he hasn’t seen in person since he helped me layup glass on the F22 bulkhead back in 2011!

We talked all things Long-EZ, flying & otherwise until the wee hours of the morning before finally hitting the rack, then continued our discussion this morning.  After a late lunch he took off back home & I got back into the shop.  It’s great to be able to visit with good friends for more than just a couple of hours, and since Marco & I started our respective Long-EZ build journeys at the same time, after having met at the EAA composites workshop, we know each other’s projects just about as well as our own.  And as I mentioned to Marco over lunch, having a building buddy –even more & above just being linked into the canard community– has really made my build much easier and faster in almost every aspect.

So late this afternoon I started on the gear by knocking out the first half of Long-EZ Plans Change (LPC) #128 that’s listed in CP-48.  It basically says that a few pilots had knocked their gear loose off the LGMAT tube and had to recenter the gear with a crowbar.  Then they ensured it stayed centered by placing flox in-between the gear tab and the 2024 aluminum gear mounting tab thus creating a thick flox washer between the two to keep the gear tabs in place both on the front & aft side of the gear.

Instead of trying to do this after the fact, if it ever came to it, and since I have no delusions of being the best pilot in the world or the fact that I won’t have a few hard landings, I thought it best to get this flox into these channels now while I still have good access.  For the record, I spent a good 10 minutes going over my build schedule and thought hard to see if I could come up with any scenarios where I would need to remove the gear for the rest of the build, and couldn’t come up with one.  So, in goes the flox!

I started by using my Perma-Grit tools to sand the glass gear tab opposite the landing gear mount extrusion so that the flox had something textured to bite into.

To better keep the flox in place, I then cut up 4 plastic strips 1/2″ wide off an old package & wrapped them around the bottom of the gear tab (technically top since it’s all upside down) and butted up against the inside edge of each aluminum extrusion. I then taped the plastic strips in place to essentially create a “U” shaped channel.

I then whipped up some epoxy with fast hardener and made some wet flox and poured it into each U-shaped trough I created around each of the 4 gear tabs.  Obviously, this will only cover about half of the area, but by starting out with wet flox I know I’ll get good coverage in the hard to reach areas.  The “top” half will get a little bit thicker flox since the lower base half will be in place with the cured wet flox.

As the LPC #128 flox cured, I went to work on widening the 7/16″ diameter channel in the gear fairing foam pieces to 1/2″ in diameter.  I started with the 1/4″ round screwdriver looking Perma-Grit tool to widen the beginning of the channel out to about a 1/2″, then I switched to the 1/2″ round abrasive tool that you see in the pic below.

This is to allow for the emplacement of the 1/2″ diameter thinner walled plastic tubing that I picked up at Home Depot.

After sanding out the channel, I tested the 1/2″ diameter tubing and it fit great.

Just for fun & to see it’s “natural” shape, as I finished enlarging each gear fairing piece channel to 1/2″, I stacked them up on top of the fuselage.  Since the edges are very close to matching you can see a bit of a washout in the second pic.  BTW, I couldn’t get the very last fairing piece to balance without the whole tower crashing down.

Of course then I had to take a pic of the other tower I had created as I removed each foam fairing piece from its original block.

I then mocked up the first left gear fairing piece and once I figured out the starting point & marked it, I whipped up some old MGS 335 epoxy (to use it up) and made a bunch of micro with it.  Below I had just painted the inboard half of the gear leg with pure epoxy before I started applying the micro.

Jumping ahead, to keep the foam pieces tight on the gear leg I used duct tape to keep the two “halves” together.  However, since the tape I was using wasn’t sticking well, I carefully wrapped the duct tape around the TE and secured the tape back onto itself, on all but one fairing piece.  This method secured the foam to the gear leg just tight enough.

A couple other notes on the install.  First off, I would like to remind everyone that there are NO instructions that come with these gear fairings!  However, that being said, I will give HUGE props to Stephen James from Eureka CNC in that once I secured these fairing pieces tightly to the gear leg, they fit so spot on that the TE of the fairing pieces aligned so well that I had no need to use the clothesline pins that I spent a good 10 minutes looking for.  Very impressive.

In addition, I mentioned previously that I needed to install these now since, unlike the Cozy version, these Long-EZ gear fairing foam pieces are cut in a single piece with a slit on the inner gear side.  However, on piece #5 I accidentally snapped it in half while sliding it into place.  It was then that I serendipitously realized that it was actually much better to mount these in 2 pieces since you can get more micro slathered on to all the surfaces.  This makes sense since instead of applying micro to the gear leg, then pushing it out of the way by sliding these pieces into place, if you simply install the front half in from the front, it captures the existing surface micro in place and keeps it in-between the gear leg and the foam fairing piece.  However, while there is a bit more room to get more micro in play on the aft side, by sliding the piece into place with the tube in the channel, the aft side is still a bit tricky to get all the micro in there for a really uniform application.  Thus, on the right side I will be cutting all the foam fairing pieces into 2 pieces before mounting them to the gear leg.

Here’s a wider angle shot of the gear legs showing the left gear fairing micro’d in place.

The shots below are a couple of hours later after I just carefully removed the duct tape securing the left gear leg foam fairing pieces in place.  You can see that I cut the ends of the 1/2″ channel tubing and ran another narrower black tube down the middle to test clearance and accessibility.  The tube works like a champ and I’m very happy with it.  BTW, the fast hardener on the MGS 335 kicks off much more quickly than the fast hardener on the MGS 285, so the micro in these pics was completely cured.

I then whipped up another batch of flox using MGS 285 with fast hardener and finished my flox gear washer mod IAW LPC #128 as described in CP-48.  I used slightly thicker flox this time since I didn’t have any dams to stem the flow of flox from running off the “top” half of each gear tab-extrusion gap.  You can also see that I had just spent a few minutes removing all the tape, plastic & errant flox from the “bottom” half flox application.

Here’s the new aft side flox “donuts.”

And the forward side flox gap fillers.

Tomorrow I plan on installing the right gear leg foam fairing pieces.  Once those are installed, I’ll start cutting all the UNI for the gear fairings.  I then plan on sanding down and laying up the left side fairing UNI on the underside of the gear leg.  I won’t be glassing the top sides of the gear fairings until after I flip the fuselage right side up.

I started out today finalizing my research on relief tube installs.  I was checking out other builders’ sites to ensure I didn’t miss any good tips for installing the relief tube.

Although my class was canceled tonight due to the storm (as you can see in the pic below!), I then spent a few hours working on my course work.  I then spent another good hour+ shoveling snow.

After I got the snow cleared off my truck, I ran to the Aviation Department at Home Depot to pick up some 1/4″ OD for the relief tube and some 7/16″ OD tubing to embed in the gear fairing channel.   I found the 1/4″ OD tubing but they didn’t have any thin-walled 7/16″ OD tubing, so I ended up buying 1/2″ OD and I’ll see if I can make it work.

After getting back home, I mocked up the 1/4″ tubing on the left gear leg.  For the record, I did check out using Nylaflow for the relief tube but I didn’t like it since it’s just so darn stiff & unwieldy.  I’m glad I picked up the 1/4″ polyethylene tubing at Home Depot since it’s much more flexible than Nylaflow.

After a few more tweaks of the tubing on the left side gear TE, I then micro’d & glassed the relief tube in place using 1 ply of BID.  I then peel plied the layup.  Since this layup will be covered with micro and the gear fairing foam pieces, I went ahead and use some old MGS 335 epoxy & hardener that I had on hand.

Here’s a shot of the top side of the gear showing the relief tube glassed in place.

After a few hours under the heat lamp, the layup to attach the relief tube to the main gear TE was pretty much cured.  Here’s a couple pics of the cured layup.

Tomorrow will be all about installing the gear fairings, possibly.  I say possibly because my fellow Long-EZ builder and Uber good friend Marco is planning on stopping by, weather & time permitting.  Still, I I do have time tomorrow I plan on getting the gear fairing foam pieces micro’d in place on the gear legs with the 1/2″ tubing in place, if it will fit.  Once the gear fairing foam micro cures, I’ll lightly sand & shape the BOTTOM of the gear fairing and then glass with 2 plies of UNI at a 30° bias in each direction.  Once I flip the fuselage back upright I’ll glass the top of the gear fairings.

I’m taking a slight detour after I evaluated the gear fairing install requirements (see below).

I started out today by sanding down the sides of the axle mounting face on the lower right leg.

I then floxed the edges of the right lower gear leg axle mounting face and then mounted the right heat shield onto the gear leg.  Before mounting the heat shield I waxed the back side of it to make it more easily removable once the flox cures.

After I mounted the heat shield, I clamped on a straight piece of wood & dialed in the toe-in for a final time to let the flox edges cure to create a nice solid base across the entire axle mounting pad.

As I was contemplating installing the right side axle, brake assembly, and wheel, I figured I would check out the foam gear fairing I have on hand from Eureka CNC.   On the Eureka CNC website there’s an example of the gear fairing kit install, but it’s for a Cozy.  Well, the Cozy gear fairing foam pieces come in halves, whereas the Long-EZ gear fairings come as a single piece with a single slit across the thin underside of each piece.  If there’s a way to get the gear fairing pieces on or off without cutting them, I honestly don’t see it.  What this means is that I need to install the gear fairings before doing the final install on the axles, brakes, wheels & heat shields.

Here’s another shot of the right side toe-in setting.  As for the gear fairing shown below, there’s one more piece that I wasn’t able set in place due to the thickness of the Fiberfrax. When I do install that last fairing piece I’ll have to reshape the foam on the inside of the fairing piece for it to fit.

Once I finished my initial assessment on the gear fairing, I removed all of the left wheel & brake assembly off the left gear strut and then installed the 90° brake line fitting into the left brake caliper.

I then mounted the -3 Stratoflex stainless steel brake lines to check how they fit.

Then, probably more for my curiosity, I set up the brake calipers in the configuration that they would be in when installed on the gear legs as they are now on the inverted fuselage.

With the brake line fittings installed on both brake calipers, I then cut another piece of 1/8″ thick Fiberfrax 4″ x 10″.  I then test fitted the Fiberfrax piece on the left side gear leg.  I marked the area and then covered it with a good coat of RTV Silicone adhesive before putting the Fiberfrax in place.

The pics below show the Fiberfrax set in place on the left gear leg.

I then covered the Fiberfrax with foil tape.

Although I don’t have the wheels installed, since I’m moving into a new phase on the main landing gear, I figured I would take a shot with the mini-“Straight Tower of Pisa” taken down.

Tomorrow I’ll be on the hunt for 7/16″ OD thin-walled tubing to mount inside the gear fairing to allow for installing brake lines, relief tubes, etc.  I also need to determine the feasibility & cost of flaring the 3/16″ stainless steel brake line tubing I have on hand.  If it doesn’t seem doable in the very near future, or is too costly, I will most likely run Nylaflow from the aluminum brake lines ending in the hell hole to continue down the gear legs.