Anti-Splat Nose Gear Fairing Alignment

[JVolkober]

I am looking for suggestions on how to fix the alignment of my anti-splat nose gear fairing. Without the fairing and intersection fairing in place, my RV-9A flies with the ball centered at cruise. With the fairing in place and with the trailing edge off-set to the left of center about 1/8? to ??at the interface with the cowling, the plane flies with the ball 1/4 diameter to the right, requiring right rudder to center. The obvious solution appears to be to set the trailing edge of the fairing further off center to the left. While this is not terribly noticeable unless one gets underneath and looks at the intersection with the cowling, it would be nice if I could figure a way of correcting the tendency for the fairing to pull the nose to the left without having to mount it off center. Any suggestions?

John

[curtis]

I have been toying with the idea of off-setting my NLG gear leg fairing in order to eliminate my rudder trim tab. I'm thinking that the gear leg would be less noticeable than a tab on the rudder.

[scsmith]

I think you need to offset it with T.E. left because of the propeller swirl. The problem is, the swirl angle is very dependent on power setting and speed. What would be really cool is if you could make the fairing free to pivot and it was stable, so it always 'feathered' to the lowest drag orientation.

Absent that, try to set it up for cruise, and you may have some parasite drag on it during climb because it will be at too small an offset angle. Doing it the other way around is probably worse.