One of the final tasks for the nose gear door mechanism is a spring at the actuator. The gear is retracted with a hydraulic cylinder. But when retracted, it can (and does) move in flight. With a hard link between the nose gear leg and the actuator, the door will constantly be opening slightly when the nose gear bounces.

The fix is to put in a heavy spring between the nose gear leg and the actuator.

So I got a large spring and mounted it to the actuator.

Installed.

 Now when the nose gear moves a bit, the doors will stay closed. A final task is to create an up-stop behind the actuator that will define the closed position of the gear doors.

Malcolm has a chain hoist so we don’t need a bunch of people to flip the plane. It also makes for some very interesting photo op’s. 

Ready for lift-off

Coming back down.

Back to upside down.

Something I never got to. Upside down with both wings on.

Malcolm says now is a good time to start fitting the engine cowling. If I had to guess, it would have taken me weeks to do this. But when you’ve done it dozens of times, it’s easy AND fast… With one minor exception. For some reason, My upper cowling didn’t have a flange. The flange is a lip that is created when the cowling is made. This flange is used during the initial mounting to hold the upper and lower cowls together. So we had to make some temporary flanges.

Lower cowl in place.

Here you can see where the cowl is cut for the trailing edge of the wing.

Lower cowl cleco’d to the fuselage.

Upper cowl mounted. You can see the “temporary” flange on the upper cowl (small white tabs where the clecos are).

One day, there’ll be an engine in there (the middle opening is where the prop will attach and the two small holes are cooling outlets).

The two cowling halves get joined together. Here you can see the layups that make the two halves one.

Here’s the other side.

Once the inside layups cure, the flanges are cut away and the outside gets a layup.

When the outside layups cure, the one-piece cowl is made into two pieces. A line is drawn from the trailing edge of the wing and then the cut is made.

The lower cowling cut away and removed.

Now it’s time to make the mounting flanges where the cowl will attach to the wing root.

First the lower skin of the wing needs to be trimmed back. Masking tape is used to help follow the lines.

After the cut.


The lower cowl is remounted and some tape is used to hold the upper and lower halves together.

Then some tape is applied to the inside of the cowl so the layups don’t stick to the cowl.

Malcolm likes to use an old piece of garden hose to create a radius. Here it’s held in place with tape.

Ready for the 5 BID layups.

Ta-Da! CoPilot side lower mounting flange.

Pilot side lower mounting flange.

Slightly out of focus closeup.

Starting the plumbing for the landing gear. Before any lines are run, the emergency dump valve has to be mounted. The dump valve allows the landing gear to be lowered in the event of a loss of electrical power. In the Cessna, this is accomplished with a manual pump. If the hydraulic pump can’t be run, the gear is pumped down manually. On the Velocity, the gear is retracted with hydraulic pressure. When the pressure is released, gravity will pull the gear down. Simple!

Originally, the dump valve was on the pilot side of the center keel. But a while back, it was moved to the co-pilot side. Malcolm has a set of templates to identify the shape and size of the opening for the dump valve.

First the location of the valve is determined. Then the first template is placed and the hole is marked.

Then the first hole is cut and the other templates are placed and marked.

The outer skin and foam are cut away.

Then the foam gets a radius.

Finally, the area is covered with two layers of BID.

The bulkhead fittings for the hydraulic lines will be located as high on the bulkhead as possible. To identify the optimal location, Malcolm shined a light from the inside of the keel towards the canard bulkhead. Then I marked the canard bulkhead so we could see where the fittings would be located.

Then, two holes where drilled.

And the bulkhead fittings are installed.

Once the 2 BID layup has cured, the dump valve is installed.

Now that the bulkhead fittings and the dump valve is installed, it’s time to finish up the landing gear hard line plumbing.

The lines from the bulkhead going aft inside the keel.

Between the bulkhead and the dump valve is the nose gear overcenter stop. So the hard lines have to be bent around that.

The lines aft of the dump valve and the T on the other line will be high-pressure flex lines.

Forward of the canard bulkhead, the line will go from the bulkhead fittings to the hydraulic pump.

At Hangar 18, they take the “Working isn’t good enough. It also has to look good and be aesthetically pleasing to the eye.” approach. The way Malcolm ran these lines is almost a work of art.

With the landing gear hydraulic hard lines installed, there are two flex lines which go from the dump valve T fittings to the nose gear cylinder. The two flex lines from the main cylinder to the nose cylinder were run in Sebastian.

I am using a pre-wired landing gear control unit made by Wayne Lanza at Composite Designs. It consists of a control unit and and gear select lever. The control unit is mounted in the nose of the fuselage.

First, hardpoints are created, attached to the control unit and then structural adhesive is applied to the back of the hardpoints. The control unit is held in place while the adhesive cures.

This is one of those milestones that makes all the days of seemingly no progress worthwhile.

It’s a rather large file but (for me) it’s worth it.

Gear Retract

Or you can view it here on YouTube.

I omitted a rather important point in the previous post on gear retraction. Which is after the gear was raised, it didn’t stay up. As soon as the power was removed, the gear began dropping. It is supposed to stay up.

The culprit was a bad (leaking) nose gear cylinder. A call to Albert revealed that there was a bad batch of these. I called Scott Swing at the factory and he confirmed it. The date that I got mine was at the tail end of when those cylinders were in the pipeline. He said to send it back and he would rebuild it.

So I removed the cylinder and shipped it down to Sebastian, FL. Scott rebuilt it and the cylinder got back to Malcolm’s about a week later (when I wasn’t there). So Malcolm reinstalled it and did another test.

This time, after the gear was retracted and the power removed, the gear stayed up. Malcolm said that FORTY-EIGHT HOURS LATER, the landing gear was still firmly up.