Canadian long-ez

I decided to spend some time cleaning up the NG6. I was concerned at first about the finish of the casting but after talking to Jack he assured me that there has never been a failure of his castings. So I went to work on getting rid of any stress risers that were on the surface and to make sure there was no inclusions.

Here are some pics of the areas that I was concerned about.

Another pic of surface scoring.

The mounting surface for the gear leg would also require some attention.

I filed the surface until it was perpendicular to the axis of rotation.

Here is the surface of the casting after I sanded it out. The aluminum is quite soft so it blends out easily.

All is smooth.

The original builder of the nose gear must have had to do some aggressive sanding to get the original NG6 to fit. The bias cloth was thin and sanded through in some areas. My new NG6 has some play so I decided to put a layer of bid on the end of the nose gear.

Here is a pic of the one layer on the end of the gear strut.

I assembled the NG30s with the NG6 so I could test fit the gear leg and get it ready for bonding. You can see in the pic that the gear strut is square to the NG30s. So taking the time to true the surface on NG6 was worth it because now I can clamp it in place and not have to worry about the gear leg being cocked.

After I was sure that everything was going to be in the right place I prepped all the parts and bonded the NG6 to the gear strut. Of course I used the structural adhesive to bond the two. You can also see that I left the one layer of glass undrilled until after it was bonded. This way I didn’t have to worry about adhesive getting in the holes.

Here is everything lined up and curing.

After the adhesive had cured I back drilled through the preexisting holes in the gear leg into the NG6. The tool in the picture is called a reverse counter-bore. It is meant to be used in areas that you cant get a drill into but I also like to use it thick parts because it is easy to get your spot face perpendicular to your hole.

All four holes where spot faced and now have a flat surface for the washer to sit on.

Next step was to install the NG3 and the NG4. These are the stainless ones that Jack provides in his kit. I managed to not take any pictures of transferring the hole from the NG4 to the NG3. To do this step I clamped the two into position on the strut. I then measured out the location of the 0.250 hole and transferred its location onto the NG3. I also used a scribe to lightly mark it location on the inside of the NG3. I stepped up the size of drill bits as I continued to drill the hole to full size. This approch worked for me, however, what i failed to do was check the width of the NG4 to the end of the actuator. I had it in my mind that I would still be using washers to take up the slack. It turns out that the width of the NG4 was too narrow after bonding it onto the gear leg. This was also added to by the way I had it clamped. I should have used a spacer to keep it at the correct width while bonding. Anyway, before I figured that all out I scuffed the inside surface of the NG3 for bonding.

I then deburred the holes.

Once all the parts were cleaned I bonded them all together. I used the dimension that Jack has in the drawings that he provides. I did a little math so I could measure from hole edge to hole edge and made sure both sides were in tolarance.

Here is a pic of it all clamped up and curing.

After the adhesive had cured I cleaned up any goobers and called it done.