Gear Fairings

The last of the fairings! A year after my first flight I finally got around to fabricating the last of the fairings -- the upper gear leg/fuselage intersection fairings. There is not a great deal of guidance on how to make these things in the plans; and I've seen quite a bit of variation on other RV's. I decided to take the no frills route. First, before I removed the inboard wings fairings, I traced their edge onto the fuselage. I'll transfer this line to the new fairing so I know where to make the edge. Then I globbed on the clay. I extended the line of the gear leg to the fuselage to shape the upper part of the clay, and used a straight-edge to extend the line of the fuselage bottom over to the gear leg to make up the shape of the bottom of the fairing. The forward and aft edges where just shaped until the looked right.

I laid up about four or five layers of fiberglass over the clay. Once cured, I split it at the back edge with a razor blade and removed it from the plane by sliding it over the bottom of the gear leg. I protected the gear leg fairing with a piece of folded .016 AL as I slid the new fairing off.

After some micro-balloons and a couple fill/sand sessions they looked pretty nice. A coat of hot rod grey primer and they were done. I attached them using the two outboard screws on the gear cover on the bottom of the plane and one #6 screw tapped into the side of the fuselage, in between the existing #8 screws of the gearbox. I'm real happy with the end result.