Brake lines attempt 1
After work, I stopped by Academy sports and picked up a digital fish scale to use to set the breakout force on the nut for the nose gear. It worked great.
Then I moved on to working on forming the aluminum 1/4″ tubing down each main gear leg to the brake calipers. The curly bend at the wheel kicked my butt. I made three attempts all of which I didn’t like. There is nothing particularly difficult about this, but my builder skill mojo simply seemed to not be working this evening. I spent about two hours bending tubing, all of which went directly in the trash. I have spent quite a bit of time looking at other people’s pictures of their brake line bends at the wheel, and I don’t think many of them are planning for what that tube needs to look like for the wheel pant to fit. Surely some people find that surprise much later after flight testing when they try to install the wheel pants and fairings. I don’t know, it just seems like the huge looping bends that you see in people’s initial build pictures won’t cut it in the end. We’ll see. The weekend is upon us, and I think I have enough tubing to give it a couple more shots.
