Friday, February 11, 2022

Time: 5h

• Mounted right tire
• Packed the wheel bearings with grease
• Installed Landing Gear Legs
• Test fit rudder pedals

When I purchased the kit, there was what I know to be an incomplete hardware kit available from Wicks. I did not realize how incomplete it was until I started. I am going to try to keep an accurate log of all hardware that I use during this build for others to use as a guide/reference/suggestion. Most of the work done today was fitting, cleaning holes, figuring out the right bolt sizes, test fitting, etc... I will have to replace 4 bolts in the rudder pedals and 8 bolts in the landing gear, but that should be pretty easy now that all the prep work was done.

When I went to test fit the rudder pedals I realized I have two pilot left pedals, not a left and right pair. A quick text message to Mark had that solved. A truck is coming in from the factory in about three weeks and a right rudder pedal will be delivered to me.

Photo Stream

One wheel left to mount

Tube and Tire mounted!

The white stuff is baby powder that I spread all over the inside of the tire and the tube to make installation easier.

Installing the brake discs

Removing the crating bracket from the landing gear mount

Installing the left landing gear

Cleaning the holes for the shock mount

The metal parts are painted and often times paint inside the hole makes it a tight (or impossible) fit for the bolt. A little fine sand paper wrapped around a screw driver of the appropriate size does the trick.

Test fitting the rudder pedals

When doing this it was realized that we have two left pilot rudder pedals. No right. For the passenger, we had a proper pair.

Getting ready to grease the wheel bearings

Loading the wheel bearing grease packer

Packing the bearings

I purchased this from my local O'Reilly Auto Parts store. I was going to pack by hand bug figured that packing will be part of routine maintenance, so why not make things easy on myself.

It's on it's gear!

Family posing next this milestone

When building the Zenith Cruzer, it was many months until the plane was standing on it's own gear. This isn't to say the Bearhawk is better or worse, just a different type of build. None-the-less, the family (and myself) only knows the Zenith build, so seeing it on it's gear within the first week was pretty fun!