Last steps of dismantling

Over the last week, Mark made great progress in removing the excess welding maetrial from the old repair. He pretty much removed everything that needed to be removed except the portion of the flat plates still welded to the bottom longerons.

 

I wanted to use these plates one last time before removing them and here is why. As I need to oversize the gear attachment bolts (AN5 to AN6 size), I need to get rid of the old bushings and replace them with larger ones. I decided to progressively drill them out until reaching the OD of the new bushings. In order to achieve that with reasonable precision, we decided to fix a mag drill on a steel beam sitting on the bottom longerons while the fuse was mounted upside down:

 

As you can see, having the old flat plates still welded to the longerons was a good reference to clamp the steel beam on the fuse. Big thanks to friendly Claude from whom I could borrow the mag drill.

 

While Mark was working on removing the old welding last week, I decided to take the opportunity to make a small modification to my landing gear. I wanted to do this for a long time and since everything is teared down, it is much easier to do it now: rotate my brake calipers aft. My original setup was with the calipers mounted downwards and I didn't like much the idea of scraping the caliper on the ground if I ever have a flat tire or tire burst.

After a few tests playing with the different components, I found the caliper position that I think was a good compromise; it needed a small adjustment of the nutplate attachment lug and a bit of trimming on my wheelpants.

First I washed the wheel hub and brake parts with varsol to have clean parts to work with:

 

Then, I slightly trimmed the nutplate lug, and with the use of a cardboard template and my Dremel with a cutting wheel, I trimmed of the piece needed on the wheelpant:

And here is the almost-final result:

 

I'm going to have a little extra trimming to do to clear the fitting on the top, but I preferred to have the final fitting in hand before doing that.

The 4130 steel tubes and plates are in transit right now. With chance, I will receive it this week and start trimming the first tubes this week-end!