wheels and brakes

09 Mar 2005 wheels and brakes

I got the wheels and brakes on. This went just like the instructions say – nothing special. I had to run the brake line from the brake system to the bottom of the Grove landing gear. This was the only difference from what is written in the plans.

Note that you have to change the location of the bleed valve on one of the brake assembies.

This shows the bottom of the gear leg, with the fitting on there. ATTENTION: The bolts on the bottom are on wrong! I had to change these, per the plans, for clearance of the wheel pants. The bottom two nuts need to be on the wheel side of the gear leg.

Wheel and brake on there.

The wheel pant bracket seems pretty sturdy, but there have been reports of it breaking. I primed and painted them using rattle can paint.

A view of the right wheel and brake.

Another view from the bottom.

Once you are happy with the wheels on there, you get to decide how tight to screw down the axle nut, and then drill a hole in the axle for the cotter pin. The wheel should be just tight enough so that it does not move in our out, but not so tight that it drags too much. It is kind of tricky to drill the hole, since the wheel gets in the way. What I did was to carefully mark the position of the nut, count exactly how many turns it took to get the nut off, and then removed the wheel, replaced the nut, and drilled the hole with the wheel off. I drilled straight through the axle from the top. This was a mistake. I should have drilled from the top for the top hole, then come in from the bottom for the bottom hole. One axle came out fine, the other was a little bit off. No big deal, but if I had it to do again….