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Here's the forward fuse with nosegear installed. This baby is
starting to look like something!!!
I'm really pleased with the look of the nosegear. It is a Robart 640 series steerable nosegear unit with a 7/16" diameter forked strut. The nosegear retracts through an angle of 105 degrees, which is 10 degrees less than the scale retraction angle of 110 degrees. I special ordered it from Robart and it took forever for them to get it to me (about 8 weeks) but I'm very pleased with the product. I'm planning to use 640 series retracts for the mains as well, 85 degree, straight struts. |
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Here is the nosegear well. You can see the steering arms and air cylinder. The nosegear doors are attached with 4 Klett hinges. A piece of music wire is pushed through all 4 hinges, making for a nice crisp action. |
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Here is a closeup of the door actuation mechanism from the front.
F10 is visible in the background.
I had to rework the actuators, the ones on the plans were too short to catch the strut on the way down. Note the rubber bands that hold the doors in the open position. In the background you can see the pull-pull cables for nosegear steering. The servo is not mounted in this view so the cables are slack. |
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Here are the actuators from the back. The retract unit can be seen in the background. |
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Closeup of the nosegear unit. Note that I am mounting them with 8-32 nylon bolts (only two of them are installed in this picture). The idea is for the bolts to fail before the nosegear or it's mounting structure get destroyed. |
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Nosegear retraction sequence - #1 |
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retraction - #2 |
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retraction - #3 |
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retraction - #4 |