Well, rather than lay on a boring history lesson of the Lysander it can be done bit by bit as I go along mending things. OK?
Here is a pic of the undercart. I designed this shape to fit a box structured fuselage with mild steel vertical tongues welded to the chrome moly legs. At the end of the legs you can see oleos. They have about 2" of vertical travel. (sufficient for my egg shell landings! )The tabs welded onto the top of the leg struts are there to accept the steel wing struts. It was expertly cut and welded together according to my plan by the late Steven Turner. Steve, the son of friend BB was an expert in all classes of welding. He was capable of welding stainless to aluminium ! He passed away last year having had a sudden illness. Way too young. We miss him.
The reason I show this is because even with this strength of structure the legs have been bent out to a bit of a splay over 12 years of landings ... obviously not all "egg shell" ! I have not taken a shot of the degree of splay as it was before the plan to go and do a build thread.
The pulling of the legs together had to be done with great force and at a slow pace. And the final tension (scary) was left to do its work for a couple of hours. A test release of the tension was done at an hour and there was a bit of spring back, but a big improvement anyway. As one leg was slightly more splayed out than the other this presented another problem. The only way to fix it was to have the heavy strapping bound around at different heights on the straight part of the vertical legs. More leverage was applied to the greater splayed leg. Tension was again wound up to even slightly more than the first time. It took all my strength to turn the heavy ball driver "winder". The whole front end was off the table with the plane suspended from the ceiling.
When it was finally released after another hour all was fine with no discernible splay left.
About 4 or so years ago I did take the whole moly cart out. The fingers were unbolted from the square sides of the fuselage and the whole caboodle dropped out with just a bit of damage to the skirts of the open box underneath. This method with the twisted strapping was easier, and with no damage.
Later, Friends
Ken
__________________ To repair.
102" Meister P-47 Moki 150
1/4 Scale P-47 Moki 400
To maiden
Fatface Skyraider DLE 130
Ziroli Hellcat Moki 150
Flying ...
Westland Lysander 168" Moki 250
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