Tie down rings on or off.
 

Hi all,
During preflight do you remove your tie-down eyelet's? Check the POH under Right Wing and Left Wing preflight. In both areas the POH says Tie-Down - REMOVE eyelet. I am thinking that the POH is trying to say, "don't install the eyelet's until you need them". Funny, it does not say the same thing for the tail tie down eyelet.
I have heard it explained that there is a possibility of dissimilar metal corrosion if you leave the tie down eyelets installed in the wing. What do you do about this and why?
Thanks

I have never heard that, but if it had shown it self to be a problem, there are lots of bolts and screws that would be a concern as well.

It is best to leave the tail tie down ring permanently installed because it acts as a tail skin if you ever accidentally drag the tail (just grinds a little bit of cheap steel instead of a lot of expensive parts.

As for removing the wing tie downs...... That is how you achieve the spec'ed max. cruise speed of 120 Kts. If you leave them in, the speeds in the POH wont match ;)

aircraftspecialty's stainless tie down rings should help you recover some of that 0.1kts though, and they definitely add a couple knots of coolness factor: http://www.aircraftspecialty.com/rvall2.html

Mine Retract
 

My RV friends gave me a hard time for leaving the wing tiedowns on our RV-6, and I didn?t like the location of the left one because the tiedown rope/chain got hung up on the pitot tube. Besides, they?re a bit awkward to reach. So I made up a set of spring loaded ones that attach to the spar and wingtip ribs. Fixed!

I consider the wing eyelets optional. We don't need them in the hangar, but if parked near helicopters or jet blast while inside the restaurant at temporary tie downs visiting other airports for "$100 burgers", they get installed and chained up to the tie down cables, and removed again, before take off. A clean, aerodynamic plane is a happy, efficient flying plane per gallon of fuel burned.

The rear eyelet makes a good taildragger substitute instead of grinding the aluminum skins back there in the event of an "oops" moment.

tie down eyebolts
 

As several others mentioned, I leave the tail tiedown eyebolt installed permanently so that I have a tail skid. A very experienced CFI told me years ago that if you never bump the tail GENTLY on the runway then you are not making full stall landings. After nearly 400 landings on my RV-12 that seems to not be the case, but I am still watching for it. I have a hanger so the wing eyebolts are in the glove box but have never been put in place. When I occasionally tie down outside I put the ropes thru the wingtip hand holds. Seems to work fine.

There when you need 'em
 

The thing about tie-downs is that when you will need them, it will likely be raining, windy or some other ugly weather and then you'll be standing there with the canopy open looking for where you had them stowed (assuming you carried them with you). They have insignificant drag on the airframe and are downright handy when needed, so I leave them in all the time.

I did buy the stainless powder coated ones from Cleaveland Tools and install them with antiseize, so corrosion shouldn't really be an issue.

I do swap them out at annual to install lifting jack points, and then reinstall with fresh antiseize.

In a moment of anxious weight shedding efforts, I bought a pair of expensive titanium eye-bolts and ground them down to the right length/shape. They stay on the airplane. I suppose I could have achieved the same gross weight reduction by switching to light beer for a while......

That?s a good observation. I?m sitting around on snowy Saturday morning, so I searched the average American man 20 years old and up weighs 197.9 pounds and average waist circumference is 40.2 inches. Looks like human evolution is progressing faster than I thought. If you?re looking for increased performance and fixated on aircraft empty weight, you?re probably working on the wrong problem...

Titanium
 

Realize that titanium is farther from aluminum than stainless is on the galvanic corrosion charts...