Gear (Grove) leg install question

[drill_and_buck]

Tonight I torqued the NAS bolts on the 803 gear leg attach bracket per specs (20 foot pounds in 5 pound increments).

Once torqued, plans call for a 1/32 inch gap between the 803 attach bracket and 805 plate. Unfortunately, my gap is close to zero.

Note that I have the Grove gear.

I would be interested in knowing how others made out in this area, particularly anyone with the Grove gear.

Did you have to mill/file down your 803 attach brackets to get the requisite 1/32 clearance?

Any gotchas to watch out for?

Thanks in advance for your comments.

-Mike Draper
RV-8

[jmitchell]

Hi Mike,

I noticed no one has responded to your post. I spoke to an engineer at Grove about a week ago about this issue. He said the amount of gap doesn't matter one bit as long as there is even a tiny gap, in other words the outboard bracket isn't flush to its wear plate the system will function as designed.

I set 20 ft/lbs on 3 of the 4 NAS bolts and get a narrow gap. My issue was that I only got to 17.5 ft/lbs on one of them and stopped. if I kept applying torque the gap at that end would have closed. I plan on calling Grove again and asking them if this is acceptable.

Did you manage to gather any information on your issue outside this forum?

Thanks.

[drill_and_buck]

Hi Jeff,

I spoke to Vans about the necessity of having a gap between the attach bracket and the plate. You do not want to have them in contact with each other. I ended up filling one of my attach brackets to widen the gap. If you are bottoming, I would consider filling the bracket to ensure that there is a gap when torqued.

10 hours on the hobbs and no complaints.

[billdianne]

The only reason for the gap is to make sure all the torque is being applied to the gear leg ,not the bracket to the wear plate. So as long as there is any gap between the two when torqued your good to go.