Improvements for wheel pants

[Bryan Cotton]

Here are a couple of ideas I recently came up with and implemented. First, I was losing the screw into the end of the axle. I had drilled and tapped for an AN3 screw, and they keep coming out. No good way to lock it, and loctite didn't work for me. I made a little "washer" with a small hole near the perimeter, bend that side up a little, and swapped out the phillips screw for a hex bolt drilled for safety wire.

Adam had done a great job of locating the hole in the wheelpant so we could use a couple of valve stem extenders to check/fill the air in the tire. The trick is finding the valve stem. You have to either jack up the airplane to spin the wheel, or move it back and forth. I don't have a lot of room in my hangar due to having too many sailboats, so I marked the tire to tell me which way to roll the aircraft.

[pappas]

I did something very similar. I put a red dot to mark the tire valve location. However, I put the mark on the inboard side of the tire so I could see both tire valve locations while pulling or pushing the aircraft from the prop.

When I had the mark on the outboard side of the tire, pushing or pulling on one wing of a taildragger always made the other wing go the opposite way and required much ore muscle to get the valve aligned. Pulling or pushing straight back and forth from the prop was way easier.