Canadian long-ez

Here are the inserts after the tabs have been removed and excess adhesive cleaned up.

I am going to use the spring method to actuate the doors. A lot of the builders have used this method and I have not read any negative aspects about it. I am not sure who originally came up with it so I cannot credit them for the design. I looked at as many build sites that I could to see how everyone was doing it. It turns out almost everyone has the spring in a different place. So I went with my best guess. Turns out my first location would not work. The width of the doors determines how long the spring will be and with my first location after contact with the spring I didn’t have enough travel to pull the doors closed.

First I made the mounts for the spring. I turned the threads on the lathe. Me and lathes are not friends. I have the scars to prove it 😦  I couldn’t get the correct thread to match my spring but once the spring was threaded on it wasn’t coming off so I decided to go with what I had. Later when I was thinking about it I might have had the wrong gear set in the lathe.

I used my trusty dewalt tap handle to put the threads in.

I alodined them for good measure. They are 6061 so corrosion won’t be much of an issue but I figured because it is in the wheel well I would give it the best chance I could.

This was the final location for the spring. It would have been better if it was higher up on the door but I wanted to keep it on the hinge for support.

Here it is in the closed position. I am happy with the way this has turned out. Still more work to do to finish them but I now know that it will work.

This is my version of the nose bumper. One of my hammers volunteered to be a donor.

It kinda looks like a boil 🙂

I decided to put a piece of carbide under the bumper. Its an attempt to have a wear resistant material on the nose in case of an unfortunate gear up landing. The carbide will take a skid on the tarmac and survive. What I don’t know is if it will just tear out on impact. It carries into the nose about an inch and I will be reinforcing it further on the inside of the nose. Hopefully I never have to prove this mod but it was very little work and at the very least will help support the bumper.

I recessed the core and filled it with flox.

Both surfaces had flox applied.

I prepreged the glass for the layup on the bumper. I call this piece of art “Yonic” If you don’t know what it means you’ll have to look it up.

The four layers was applied to the nose extending up the edge of bumper. I also extended the last layer of glass over the strips of glass that I used to fill the landing gear door recess that I had to build up in previous steps.

The contour of my nose did not match the fuse exactly. I’m sure it was something that I did when I modeled the nose in Solidworks. It may also be some deviation in the fuse from the previous builder. When I modeled the nose I tried to followed the plans not the fuse I had. Either way I had to deal with it. I sanded the high spots.

Here it is glassed. It turned out to not be that bad but it will require a little extra micro when I fair it out.

Next I moved on to the gear doors. Now that I had the doors working and identified what clearance I needed I was able to cut some core to stiffen the doors. I used 1/8″ core.

I used the mold that I had made to keep the contour of the doors while I glassed the core to the doors.

Here is the doors under vacuum.

I had some extra resin so I added some micro and filled around the bumper. Now it only looks like a blackhead.

I put a single layer of 120 weave over the rivets that I used on the strut cover. 120 is a 3.4oz weave so its is light but it will keep the rivet heads from showing up in the paint.

I covered the hinges with packing tape then used some wet micro to fill the gap between the hinge and the fuse. I also glassed the inside of the wheel well to the instrument panel. I’m getting close to be able to flip the fuse back over.