| Thanks to everyone who has taken the trouble to reply to my posts. To address a few issues.
The retract unit mounts are 6mm birch ply plates let into 3mm birch half ribs. The half ribs are joined to the full depth ply web of the main spar and the front edge of the retract unit mounts are glued to the LE, all the joints are filleted. Hopefully this should be strong enough as thought has gone into transferring the landing stresses to the greater wing – but the U/C legs are half as long again as those in a Spitfire, say, so I’ll have to practice my ‘greasers’ before I first fly it, however I’m not famous for this type of landing.
I opted for servo driven mechanical retracts to hopefully get a more scale retract time. The pneumatic retracts that I’ve seen retract in about half a second, fine for pattern ships but not very scale. It may be possible to regulate the speed but I’ve no experience with them also, call me old fashioned but I like the idea of a powerful servo pushing a roller that turns a cam. |