- Joined
- Mar 2, 2015
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I wanted to share some photos of our Charger conversion to Grove landing gear. After repairing the original-design gear twice (broken welds and bent pins) we decided to change to one-piece spring gear from Grove. It took a while to find some pros to help me with this as I am current owner and not the builder ( and do NOT have the skills to be working on a flying machine.) My A&P/IA has great skills but as he said, "there is a difference between repairing and design/fabrication." Finally we found help and did an engineering review to figure out where the redirected stresses would now be going. We removed that X-brace that anchors the elastomer shocks and replaced with a flat X and an additional cross brace. Longerons in the area had reinforcing sleeves added (beautiful welding work) and a gusset/bracket to keep it all aligned. The nice touch was to machine the mounting blocks, rounding them off to allow the spring gear to spring. I had hoped to lose some weight compared to the welded box beam legs in the original plans but we carefully weighed the parts we took off and the parts we put on and it was within 1 pound. Those Grove gear are pretty beefy.
Now finishing with Grove wheels and brakes and fabricating mounts and fairings for wheel pants and fuselage. More pix and flight report to come.
Note: some of the photos are with temp hardware (non-final).
-MarkM
Now finishing with Grove wheels and brakes and fabricating mounts and fairings for wheel pants and fuselage. More pix and flight report to come.
Note: some of the photos are with temp hardware (non-final).
-MarkM
