Thanks John (@johnb)!

Thanks Spiros (@fiveten)!

I'm working on the landing gear struts now. This is a process of making the individual components of the struts and then fitting them together, one at a time. It is often advantageous to make the parts longer than needed to give my large fingers something to hold on to while working on the parts. So if some of these parts look too long, it is by design. The two main considerations besides being able to hold the part is making sure they are both as nearly identical as I can make them and making sure that any excess I have to remove, can be done easily enough without breaking the work already done.

One thing I wish I could do is swap out the plastic tubing for brass that has the correct inner diameter, however, I do not have any of that. So I am using the plastic tubing instead. This means that the outer diameter of the struts is slightly larger than the original kit part. I can mitigate this to a certain extent by sanding the exterior, but that is difficult to do accurately with such small pieces.

Never seen a landing gear this beautiful, Carl @clipper
Definitely worth all the work you are putting into this.

Thanks for the kind compliments Spiros (@fiveten), John (@johnb), and Greg (@gkittinger). It is my hope that others can benefit from seeing that it is not really complicated work. Just takes a bit of patience and the occasional purple clouds with lightning strikes and thunder! 🙂

Seriously though, This is the third set of landing gear that I've made and it gets easier with time. However, there are some landing gears (some of those crazy British bomber landing gears) that I would have to think twice about!

Thanks George (@gblair).

It's just fun, its why I do it! I made a bit more progress but other things came up today and I've had to put it aside until tomorrow. The struts are going to be mounted in slightly larger brass tubes glued into the forward section of the wheel wells. When I was test fitting these, I realized that I needed to have these mounts at a slight angle to compensate for the wing dihedral, or the struts would stick down at angles instead of straight down. I verified that the struts on the real aircraft are perpendicular to the ground. So the choices were to try and remake the mounts with a slight angle or simply add a small shim under one edge. Trying to hold these small pieces and sanding that angle seemed like an exercise in frustration, so I went with the shim approach. You can see them in the photo.

The shims should be a simple and effective solution, Carl (@clipper). I have had several days of unexpected things popping up, so I know exactly what you are talking about. I hope to get back to the bench tomorrow. Cheers

Thanks Spiros (@fiveten), George (@gblair), and John (@johnb). It was fun making them, however, I wasn't really satisfied with them. The white plastic tubing was just too big and I wanted something more scale looking. So I rummaged around in my metal stock and found a combination of tubing that would work better and which didn't require plastic for the strut itself (although I may use plastic for secondary items).

I'm not a big fan of redoing work, but in this case, looking at the photos of the first effort, I just felt I should try again. So here are the new struts. I still need to make the shimmed mounts, but the main part of the struts are made.

The difference this time is that the lower portion of the strut uses solder instead of thickened CA glue to form the rounded end. The way I made the parts was essentially identical otherwise, only the material being a bit different.

Even more impressive, Carl @clipper