Grove Airfoil Gear/Wheelpant Bracket Interference

[flickroll]

I am retro fitting Grove airfoil gear on my -8. Have the right gear leg on as of this afternoon and it is a JOB, not fun... I have found that the upper part of the wheel pant bracket interferes with the radius on the gear leg as the gear leg transitions from vertical at the wheel area to the angle that goes up to the fuselage. The basic problem is the vertical part of the Grove gear at the wheels is shorter than the vertical part on the stock Van's gear. There are a couple of options to fix this: trim the bracket to fit the gear leg (trim until there's no interference), but that will weaken it. Or, bend the top half of the bracket inboard to clear the radius, but that might cause a poor wheel pant fit since the attach points of the bracket for the wheel pant will now be at a different angle than what there was before.

What have others done to overcome this problem? Thanks

Jim Shannon
RV-8 N184TJ
Charlottesville, VA 22903

[Kahuna]

A Picture would be worth a thousand words, or me getting it, the latter might actually be helpful to you.
Please post a picture or send me one.

[rv8ch]

Amazing - I really didn't notice this issue, but it's there. Very slight touching of the bracket on the gear leg.

http://www.rv8.ch/article.php?story=20050718203705756



Not sure how much you have, but mine would be pretty easily dealt with by just slightly bending the top of the bracket, or even grinding it down a bit.

Thanks for bringing this to my attention, Jim!

[Rick6a]

Originally Posted by rv8ch

.....it's there. Very slight touching of the bracket on the gear leg...

This picture is not very good showing that particular detail but all I did was to slightly chamfer the top edge of the bracket slightly to relieve the riding condition. That said, it has been my experience that the flat portion of the bracket that ties into the wheelpant with screws simply does not conform to the interior contour of the wheel pant. Many builders simply torque the screws down to pull the gap out from between the bracket and pant. Years ago, there were several reports of the brackets of -6 series RV's cracking over time and a bracket made of steel became available. Just my opinion, but I believe the cracking was really caused by builders neglecting to address the inherent gap between the parts and compensated for it by overtorquing the wheel pant attach screws thus inadvertently applying a preload condition to the bracket that stressed many of the -6 series brackets to eventual failure.

So whether you bend or remove material from your bracket (admittedly much more substantial a design than the older -6 series bracket) to relieve the riding condition from between it and the Grove Airfoil gear, I recommend you shim out the gap that will almost surely occur when you fit the convex interior of the wheelpants to the flat portion of the aluminum brackets. The easiest way to do that is with liquid shim....a mixture of epoxy and flox. Apply clear packing tape to the bracket, butter the area of the wheel pant opposite the noted slash marks in the picture with a liberal amount of liquid shim, seat the wheel pant in place and draw the temporary fasteners down slightly taking care to NOT overtorque. The next day, remove the wheel pant and sand away the excess squeeze-out of liquid shim. What remains will be a sort of wedge or rectangular tapered shim that will custom fit your wheel pant. You will find that with a just little extra work, the bracket will mate with the wheel pant perfectly and no undo stress will be placed upon the bracket.

[flickroll]

The interference on mine is more than just a little. I meant to take a picture today to show what I am talking about, but after I installed the LH gear leg I forgot to..... I temporarily put the axles and wheels back on when I finished the gear installation, so tomorrow I'll try to take a picture and post. What I think I will do, rather than trim or bend the bracket, will be to put a shim between the bracket and the gear leg. Don't think it will take much of a shim.

Jim Shannon
RV-8 N184TJ
Charlottesville, VA

[scsmith]

I don't see any problem with just trimming that upper lobe of the bracket to clear the gear leg