landing gear tower replacement

[Romeo Victor]

Dear friends of the community,
after a landing accident I've got to replace the forward floor panel F-822 and the left landing gear tower.
I am working on the best strategy to start this task and like to ask you about your opinion.
Do you think that turning the fuselage upside down (canopy rails) and start removing the F-851 and F-850, thereafter F-822 and last the tower, is a good start?

Thanks for the help
Stephan
#82979

[rv8ch]

Hi Stephan, first, very sorry to hear about the landing accident.

I had a QB fuselage, so didn't build all the parts related to the gear towers. Based on a quick look at the drawings, I would say it will be much easier to repair if you can flip it - are the wings off now? If the wings are on, it's a harder decision, since that's quite a bit of work to remove them. Whatever happens, please take care to ensure that the aircraft is stable - lots of solid sawhorses, weight on the tail, etc.

Take care, and good luck.

[Mark Dickens]

It might help if you posted a few photos of the damage, inside and out. Also, I'd engage Vans on this myself.

[FinnFlyer]

My neighbor did it.

Because some of the rivets are not accessible, he's using Avex (?) structural rivets for those locations -- apparently stronger than the solid rivets. He just bought a special pneumatic rivet puller for this. Apparently they are quite tough to pull without prematurely breaking the stem (very tough to drill out).

If you want, I'll try to get more detailed data from him.

Finn