The Landing Gear.

Once again the exchange rate had me hurting with the gear so I put it off for a long time. Its finally caught up with me so here is where I'm at. With a few exceptions, I've made the parts myself or had them made at a local friendly engineer who thinks the idea of building a plane is very novel.

	The oleos seemed like they would be one of the biggest expenses with the gear and it seemed like re-inventing the wheel to a degree.  After asking around, Buzz Glade gave me the idea to use other oleos. I found some Socata oleos from a Rallye that were about the right size. Mine were second hand and very cheap. With the Kiwi dollar exchange I couldn't say no. I hand some converters made up to make them as close to standard as possible. Here are the bits for the U/C. I bought the top part and got the rest made. The axles are from Aircraft Spruce. The brackets are laser cut from a file I made with QuickCAD.
	13 May 2001   A major hurdle for me was getting the aeroplane sitting on its feet. It has a temporary wood side load strut to stop it collapsing.
	I've found that making all this stuff yourself is a big job. Hear is the Main retraction gearbox. Housing from Sequoia.. the rest made locally, I just assembled it. I had nightmares about doing this but it turned out to be quite simple. I found a much easier way that the instructions suggested. 20 June 2001
	Here it is installed. Actually I was just checking the fit of the nosegear driveshaft. 20 June 2001
	Finally..
	After MUCH stuffing around
	The gear...
	WORKS !!!   16th June 2002

There are many stories about problems with the retraction system for Falcos. Some have the gear not extending to the full limit, requiring extra manual turns of the crank (This is due to the down limit switch not being installed in the correct place ie. there is a fix for this.)