Dave's Sonex Builders Log

Today I continued the drilling of the gear legs. I removed the left main gear leg and repositioned it at the drill press to up drill from 1/8 inch to 1/4 inch. I used a new drill bit as the previous one was damaged removing a broken drill bit earlier. I up drilled both gear legs. The last step will be to up drill the axles and bolt everything together.

Setting the toe-in.

I started by comparing the purchased gear axle weldments with the drawings to determine what holes were missing. The first hole missing is the 3/16 inch pilot hole for mounting to the gear leg. Instead of drilling all the way through I drilled a 1/8 inch hole through the front side of each weldment only. This way I will be able to use the 1/8" hole to mark the pilot that I will drill through the gear leg. When I mount to the gear leg I will up drill to 1/4 and then make sure everything is aligned before drill through the back side of the weldment.

Today I continued working on the titanium bars for the main gear. I had previously cut about half way through the second gear leg. (Shortening the purchased 36 inch lengths to 34 inches). I purchased some new hacksaw blades. The recommendation for cutting titanium is to cut slowly but use an aggressive cut. I bought some 18 teeth per inch bi-metal blades. This blade worked well and I was able to get the second half of the bar in about 10 minutes. I would estimate about 20 minutes per main gear leg and 10 minutes maximum for the tail wheel.

I order the Titanium for the gear legs from Titanium Joe. Their website sells titanium by the foot. I ordered two pieces of 1.125 inc diameter 6AL-4V by 36 inches long and one piece of .625 inch diameter 6AL-4V by 24 inches long. All three need to be cut to size. The titanium arrived two days after I ordered it. This weekend I started to work on cutting the pieces to length. I cut the 5/8 diameter titanium using an only manual hacksaw with an old blade. I used a fairly heavy pressure when cutting and kept to slow cuts. This seemed to work the best. Rather than cut with a level saw blade I worked the blade angle to cut at both the front and the back of the cut to keep the area being cut at any one time to a minimum. The pressure on the saw was just enough that the blade would distort during the cut. It took about 15 minutes to cut the 5/8 piece and about 30 minutes to cut through the first 1-1/8 inch piece. I used a new blade for the first 1-1/8 piece.