The Pedal Gee Bee

I glued the landing gear into the wheel covers tonight. They fit fairly well, but I needed to do a little bit of sanding to get them to sit just right. There are two important things to remember here: 1. Make sure that you glue the correct gear into the correct wheel cover; and 2. Make sure that the gear is inserted to the wheel cover reference line on both assemblies.

After sanding the wheel cover opening so that the gear sat correctly, I used urethane glue and some VERY thin pine shims to glue it in. Basically I got the gear in up to the line, and used the glue covered shims to center it into the opening. Careful insertion of the wedged shape shims allowed for fine adjustment, making sure that not only is the gear centered but perpendicular to the cover. Once the glue had set, I snapped off the exposed parts of the shims. I’ll follow up tomorrow night with either more glue or fiberglass resin to fill the remaining gap around each gear. This last step will be important to the rigidity of the final assembly since this assembly will be experiencing a lot of stress as the craft is being used. By filling in all of the gaps, the gear will be EXTREEMLY stiff, which is exactly what we’re looking for.

Pictures soon….