[Answering mulitple messages in this one...] stephen langford wrote: > > FlyBaby > > Yeah Ron, an inch and a quarter of anchor plate! HA! HA! > I put my Fly speck in the wrong place! Kinda what I figgered. However, when I was looking into the Steve Hinton accident, I talked to one local aircraft design engineer about alternatives to the wing plates. His eyes got to glowing, and he started talking about how he could design a beautiful replacement for the plates, that could either be cast out of molten steel, or machined out of a 2" thick blank of steel. Guys who normally use the facilities of billion-dollar aircraft factories look at things differently than us homebuilders do.... :-) > As to the 5X500 wheels I have a pair of > 380 X 150 /15 X600-5 tires to go on them. > Do you thank that a 15" dia. tire will have enough shock absorbtion? Well, I'm not that conversant with the actual types o'tires out there to really be sure. You just want the volume of air between the rim of the wheel and the inside of the tire to be as big as possible. In plain English, you want a fat tire. Back when I first started flying N500F, I looked at a local ATV shop to see if I could come up with an alternative to the aircraft tire for those 800x4 wheels. Several of the tires looked like they might do the job...unfortunately, none of them fit the wheels. And their tread designs were, ummm, "a little aggressive" for an airplane. >Ron, I plan to put Fiberglass wheel pants on this Baby. Go for it, dude! I've seen several pictures of 'Babies with wheel pants, and they look pretty snazzy. >Ron, The 600 X 6 Cleveland wheels also present the same problem with >bearing pre-load, except that they have 1.50 dia. bearings, unless you >know of another way to pre-load the taper bearings without using a >threaded axle nut. >How the heck does an original 800 X 4 wheel attach to the J-3 anyway? I don't have too wide of experience with the aircraft wheels, but with the two Fly Babies I've worked on, they didn't require any sort of preload. N500F had the Cub-type airwheels, and Moonraker has Goodmumble wheels (can never remember if they're Goodyear or Goodrich...it's the kind that's now rare and hard to find parts for). Anyway, both aircraft had similar basic systems. Starting from a bare axle, the assembly sequence went like this: 1. A steel collar slid over the axle. This collar was about 1/4" thick, and had three holes drilled and tapped for hex-head set screws. The collar was, essentially, a stop to position the wheel so the brakes would interface properly. Normally, I never took this collar off. 2. A set of thin steel shims. 3. The wheel. 4. Another shim or two (based on what was there when I took the wheel off). 5. Another collar. It's been a while, but I believe the collar is identical to that on the inside...essentially a fat ring with set screws. Slide the collar on, shove everything tight against the inner collar, then tighten the setscrews in the outer collar. 6. There's a bolt that goes through the axle on the outside of the collar. Orginally on N500F, I believe this bolt originally went through the outside collar instead of using the setscrews. I suspect they changed away from that setup as it was probably almost impossible to get the exact combination of shims so that the wheel wouldn't have any play. In any case, neither aircraft had any sort of way to apply pre-load. The bearings for both aircraft were the tapered type. I took sequential pictures of pulling one of my wheels off during an annual two years back. I even found the packet a week or so ago when I was cleaning my office...but of course, I'll be durned if I can remember where I put THAT particular packet of photos. If I come across them, I'll add them to the "detailed pictures" web page, and flag folks on this email list. >Are you still there,Ron? Where else would I be? :-) Ron