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Building Tips and technical articles. => Building techniques => Topic started by: Alan Resinger on November 24, 2015, 05:49:41 PM
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Flying with Paul Walker for the last 30 plus years tends to expose one to lots of nifty building techniques and just plain
awesome engineering tricks. A couple years ago he showed up at the start of the season with his new take apart Predator. MIke Haverly had made the take apart hardware and Paul employed a removable carbon fiber landing gear. With the new build in progress I decided that the carbon gear was just what I needed for this coming years effort. The following pictures show what I came up with.
The first picture is the Yatchenko removable titanium gear that is used on quite a few of Yuri and Andrei's models. I decided to use their mounting unit which is an injection moulded unit that has a ball with a spring putting pressure on it to hold the metal gear leg.
The next picture shows the two 1/16" unidirectional carbon that I made from material I got from Dragon Plate. These two are glued together with JB Weld. The top of the leg, which after gluing is 1/8" thick is then thinned to the same thickness as the titanium leg that comes with the removable unit.
The next picture shows that I decided to make next years ship look high tech so I vacuum bagged some 2 oz. carbon cloth on the outside and it will remain clear finished so the cloth shows.
The gear looks a lot like Paul's, but I decided to one up him and milled out about 1/32" on the inside surface. The final picture shows this neat little touch.
Nothing like sparing no expense just to put a $3 pair of wheel on your next world beater.
Alan Resinger
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The escalating levels of one-upsmanship is nothing short of astonishing! I was trying to figure out how to do this, not yet having seen PW's. I still have some questions. Shouldn't those LG legs and fairings be hollow with foam cores? ;) Steve
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What is the weight savings? Looks awesome!
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Chris,
The carbon gear legs weigh 10.5g each which is less than a piece of 1/8" wire long enough for a similar length removable leg assy. The Yatchenko plug in unit is probably slightly less weight than LG blocks and plywood clips that you would need for a built up or foam wing. Then you would have to add fairings to the wire gear.
Alan
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My Alan, aren't you the clever little elf. How's the back?
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I like this aproach,, I wish my pracgtice field warranted use of wing mounted gear, but I must maintain my shock absorbing fuse gear,, for now