So I had limited time last night for building but I did get to a great milestone. The unfortunate part is that in my haste, I neglected my documentation so pictures are sparse today.
I had a dental appointment and before that I took 5 minutes to draw up the sliding mount in Fusion360 and popped it onto the printer. I had a first run when I got home but the opening was too large. two adjustments and 30 minutes later I had another that fit perfectly.
For the front doors I installed flat pin hinges into the LE of the opening and removed a bit of material from the door for the hinge to be recessed into. I glued the door to the hinge and checked for fitting. All was great. I then glued the rear of the door to the sliding mount that was printed and it works flawlessly.
I installed small segments of tubing in the wing to connect the retracts and installed the wing with the air lines connected and cycled the gear for the first time since the wing was framed up and in skeleton form. All was fine... and then I put her down on her legs.
The immediate thing here is that the wheels do look a bit small but most of that is the camera angle and a bit of parallax. The other part is that while the look is good... it's not perfect. Let me go on to explain this below.
In this close up shot you can immediately see the issue where the wheel touches the front door. There is some heft to her at this point and the oleo is compressed slightly compared to not having any weight on her mains.
Discussion:
Seeing this issue I've reflected back to try and figure out where I'm going wrong on this. I've determined a number of factors so I'll go through them one at a time.
1: The front gear door shape was determined by they shape of the die-cut part supplied in the kit. I did not think about this when I cut the doors as these are intended for fixed gear that would have no compression. The kit instructions do not have any gear doors when using retracts as this is intended to be more of a sport scale model with no front door and just a round opening in the wing for the wheels.
2: Referencing full-scale pictures, the door shape is wrong. the lower portion is narrower and the right side (reference picture above) does taper slightly to the left, not straight down.
3: The wheels also are positioned a bit more outward away from the struts on the full-scale to accommodate brakes. Something I did not do due to the shallow recess of the wheel bay in the wing.
The Fix:
Looking back at previous pictures of the wheels in the bay with one door down, I think I can add one more nylon washer to push the wheel outward. I also will remove 1-2mm of material on each side of the lower part of the door and taper it properly as the full scale did. I'll add back that thickness to the wing sheeting so that a clean look is maintained when the gear is retracted.
I'm getting into full disclosure of a mistake but, frankly, these things happen when you try to make a sport-scale model into a scale one. All this in mind, it really is fairly minimal work to fix and After that I need to work on plugging everything in and have a looooong conversation with my Taranis. On that note I want to point out that I use a digital servo tester that tells me what the wavelength of the PWM frequency. This in mind, I can set exactly what I need for the throws on the fiddly bits like the bomb drop, door retraction, tail gear retraction, canopy slide, and of course the air valve movement. While it's nice to have the mechanics worked out perfectly, it rarely happens that way. I'll write down some of these numbers before I go into my programming. It MAY be possible to tie in the tail gear retraction and the gear door retraction into one channel... but it depends on the mechanics. I never thought I would have to think about conserving channels on my Taranis... EVER.