My Landing Gear - Wheel Pants

N247BR

Landing Gear - Wheel Pants

Just down the road from the airport where I have my project (correction airplane) is an aircraft graveyard called Air Salvage of Dallas. Every year they have a yard sale where they open up the facilities and have a giant sale on their inventory. During the sale, the prices are great. I took advantage of their sale one year and found a pair of wheel pants from an airplane that was totally destroyed with about the only usable parts left being a pair of wheel pants. They aren't perfect but I am in the process of stripping them to the bare glass and refinishing them. Seems I wasn't the first to refinish them either, they had three different paint colors underneath the red and black. They also needed some repairs but nothing major. The most difficult part was getting the mounting plates off of the original plane to use as templates. The gear, wheels, and plane was so badly damaged I still can't understand how the wheel pants survived. Took me half a day to extract one side for a pattern.


This is what I picked up for $105 at Air Salvage.	The tow bar at $5 was perfect on my gear. Now wait until I get my electric tow chair working.

The color scheme is great but not for a white with blue airplane.	Had to get new shoes, the old ones had dry rot and cracks.

The mounting plate I pulled from the original plane was bent in a dozen different way. I had to flatten it out the best I could and have it duplicated by a machine shop. Great job too.	I knew I would have to perform surgery on the mount but couldn't tell how much until I got them in hand. A little hack saw and some grinding and I got perfect fits.

Some things look a lot simpler that they turn out to actually be and the reassembly of the brake calipers and roter on the copilot side turned out to be the biggest exception I have encountered along the way. NOTHING wanted to bo back into place and I needed four sets of hands to make it work. Other than that, the mounting plates look great and work as intended. Now I pray I never have to remove then and or the brakes again.

I stripped the wheel pants down to their grey primer.	Had to strip further to apply an additional layer of glass to repair some damage found.