SonexBuilders.net

Greetings,

While Dynon has my D180, I'm installing the hydraulic brakes, and would like to get the wheel pants installed. The previous owner of the project had the wheel pants on at some point, but with the tiny stock tires. I went with larger tires for the added prop clearance, and I don't see any way to squeeze those inside the stock wheel pants. It seems like one piece wheel pants aren't the best solution as tires get larger either, since you have to have an opening on the bottom that's large enough to fit over the tire. It becomes sort of a tire umbrella :-)

I did some general searching, and it seems there are people who squeezed the larger tires in the stock wheel pants, but I'm thinking they were not Onex builders. The extra 5/8" thickness of the Onex flat gear legs is a significant difference, so I'm pretty much ignoring those threads.

There were some comments about cutting the pants down the middle, and making them wider, which I think would have to happen. I hate fiberglass work, but it does look like that might work. The problem there that you also need some extra height to get the most out of the wheel pants. At this point, I'll take easy and cheap if I can make the stock wheel pants work.

In the long run, I'm thinking Van's pressure recovery wheel pants would be a better option. They're crazy expensive of course. Has anyone used those, or maybe other wheel pants for the larger tires?

Thanks
Rusty

Clearly not a popular topic :-) I cut the wheels in half today, and it's a better fit than I expected. I'd just need to spread the two halves apart about 1/2" to 3/4". I should probably have waited until I upgraded the brakes from mechanical to hydraulic to see if that moves the wheel in or out a significant amount, but almost certainly some modification would still be needed. I'm still tempted to order the RV-8 wheel pants kit. Most of the RVs use the same wheel pants, but the brackets are different, and the -8 brackets are made to mount on flat gear legs.

Rusty

That looks good. A little fiberglas effort and you’re in business.

That's a project I haven't tackled yet. Another Sonex owner with the O'Keefe brakes sent me a few pics including this one:



I honestly though about just rigging up the old school Maule style with just the trailing portion behind the tire. The opinions I found of this was it was more cosmetic and didn't do anything for cruise speed.

I've always read that the trailing edge is where you save drag, but I can't see that Maule style doing anything useful. I can't even say it looks better since it's so odd.

There's a pretty big difference in how the Onex and Sonex attach, since the flat gear takes up 5/8" of space.

My current plan is to just do the fiberglass work once I get the Aerovee brakes installed next week. I think the Van's pressure recovery wheel pants would be an improvement, but likely not enough of one to be worth the $550 cost. I have so much cooling drag now that the wheel pants are probably the least of my problems.

Rusty