Undercarriage III

Pistoning

Working on my idea I started building a piston to move the landing gear by cutting a short eyeballed length of a polystyrene rod. The first try was a bit too long so I shortened it a bit (about 5mm). Based on a dry-fit it seemed to be fine from one end.

With a decent tube at hand I sliced off a piece off the end, based on my guess for the angle of the landing gear setup. This I did to get the maximum contact surface between the foot piece and this rod I was working with. It ended up being just fine.

To make my new piece follow more or less the same design with the pre-existing piston-like things (could've been shock absorbers to be more precise with my guesses) I decided to add a ring-like thing near the bottom end. At this point I believed that a single arc was going to be good, but as usual, I didn't block the idea of adding to it later on. Maybe it wasn't going to look plausible alone, especially at a close look, so it most likely was calling for some greebling in the near future. Viewed from a bit further away it worked just the way I had intended.

Installation

My actual customization process started by gluing the rod to the bottom (or top?) of the landing gear bay and onto the landing gear setup by its angled end. Had my landing gear been in a different state altogether I would never had done this stuff in this order, I would've added these first sturdily and only then set the feet on. Things being as they were I worked with pliers, gentle grumbling and a few retries later I had got the styrene rod into its place. After waiting for the glue to cure for a bit I glued the collar on, its target location decided with the age-old method of "looks good there".

Testing

Perhaps for the fiftieth time during this project I wanted to see the intermediate result and propped the cockpit module on just to see what was going on. I was still positive about this.