Wheels and Brakes

The wheels, hubs and brakes are top notch coming from Vans and Cleveland. The split hub does require some finagling to get the tube in w/o pinching it between the hub half's. Some how I ended up with 2 tubes for the front wheel, and its a good thing. Even after carefully making sure I was not pinching the tube, I pinched the valve instead and had to use the spare.

Here is the right wheel assembly (left) and the main nose wheel.

The castle nut on the nose wheel does require the correct tension to prevent the old shopping cart wheel effect (shimmy). A fish scale and 22lbs of tension before the control arm moves, sets the correct tension.

Here is the brake line exit location (left) and the cockpit side routing (right). I will not know until I mate the wings again if this location is ok or not. The wing mount goes in that general vicinity and until I get the wing back in there, I won't know for sure if there is a conflict in location.

Here is a shot of the nose wheel pant. This was not a difficult job, it was just tedious and hard on the knees crawling around on the ground. You have to remove the wheel a dozen times or so while you fit the pants to the wheel. Here I used a dowel to simulate the axel to get the brackets aligned. BTW, the plans indicate a dimple in the fairing to indicate where the center axel should be. Well there was no dimple in my fiberglass.

Here is a front shot into the housing.

Here are the main gear support brackets

On to filling the brakes