The wheel pant fit, even the pants themselves were going to need fixing and finally I am here to address the issues. These things need to be in the ‘right place’ aerodynamically and I need easy access to inspect and pump up the tires in-between the annual maintenance.

I spent over a day on my knees in the hangar playing with the laser and sorting out where my pants were in relation to the rest of the plane. Its pretty easy now, I just get the longerons to 2 degrees up and my self leveling laser will draw a straight line.

The line needs to sit at the ‘point of pressure at the nose and in the middle of the pant tail. The pants themselves also need to be in line. Oh and the nose and tails of the pants probably should be equally spaced from the center line of the aircraft and exactly the same distance fore and aft to each other just to be tidy.  I have plumb bobs and squares and rulers for that little game.

I’ll spare you 20 or so more pictures. I was pretty much in line but only at 1.2 degrees nose down when I wanted 2 degrees relative to the longerons.

I spent some more time seeing how I could tweak a few angles. After a while I tried some clecos and discovered I might be able to get these pants sitting correctly.

With even more clecos and a lot of thinking I started to get a plan on how to not only have the pants where they need to be BUT also some way for getting half of them on and off easily.

I’ve decided to make the front half the more permanent ones using ordinary screws. The rear half will get camlocs for ‘in the field’ maintenance (pump up and check). Instead of the three nutplates on a big ‘Y’ bracket I think I can make it work with these little guys as you see above in the pic.

Here I am setting the pant hole position using a modified bolt. A blow with a hammer makes an exact mark for the hole position.

OH, and notice I have the big back-plate in this photo with the three nut plates?

Here’s the completed new mini bracket with the nut plate installed. I just used some box aluminium and cut it down a little.

Oh and notice the big back plate is gone in favour of a little plate without the three nut plates?

This is the bracket I’m working on for the other pant. The ideal gap between the pant and bracket was just slightly smaller than the other side. I had to improvise a bit given there was no box aluminium the right diameter. I’ll do the nut plate tomorrow.

Now you might notice the Y bracket in the photo on the floor. This is what my new bracket replaces. I found that by attaching the pant to the bonnet on the gear leg I didn’t need the 3 attach point bracket after all. Its also a PIA to fit onto. Getting rid of it is part of the ‘lets make it easier’ solution.

There are a lot more little things that need doing to make this work according to my self set brief. I’ll try and document most of the details as I go.