Landing Gear Installation

Today, a great milstone was achieved on my rebuild: I reinstalled the landing gear with its new attachment points design.

As explained in this post, a major change in the way the gear is attached to the fuse was required. I got the last part I needed last week: the butterfly plate. Big thanks to my friend Scott for cutting the part with his router. I also thank my brother-in-law Jean, who anodised the part in his shop!

So here's the assembly.

Orange: butterfly plate made of 0.065" thick 2024-T3 aluminium (grey anodised)
Green: radius plates made of 7075-T6 aluminium (black anodised)
Blue: Backing plates made of 303 SS

I lifted the tail high enough so that the bottom longerons are parallel to the ground, easing up the installation of the gear:

Once all fasteners properly torqued:

Details of the stack:

Next step is to prep the engine before reinstalling on the airframe. I like where this is going  : )

Mags Overhaul

Received my overhauled mags last week. They were working ok but since they had just passed 500h and I couldn't find any trace of maintenance on them in the logs, I decided to make preventive maintenance and send them as recommended by my friend François. It turned out it was a good idea; one mag had a broken case and a magnet pitted by corrosion!

Both flanges were cracked like this:

Corroded magnet shaft:

Newly overhauled mags with the following replaced by new:

• one casing
• one magnet
• new contacts
• new capacitors
• impulse coupling spring
• and a bunch of little brackets and parts all in the bag shown on the first picture of this post

Thanks to Luc from BL Aviation for his great service!