P-51C Mustang - Torque Links Continued

I cut the the pivot tubes .1" long and glued them to the center of the piece. Epoxy works best for attaching the stainless steel tube to the plastic. The tube that has the eyebolt passing through it is a .040" rod with a .015" hole drilled through the center. Once the glue dried I very carefully filed the vertical sides down to a taper like the real torque link. The large axle will be .020" rod. I will make the actual axles when I get closer to installation, but the stand-ins work for now.

The main strut was going to have to be fabricated mostly because the kit part looked lame. Also in order to make the landing gear retractable, I would have to modify the axle point at the top of the strut. The kit piece is angled and I need it to be straight. However, the bottom portion of the strut was ok and I wasn't about to try to scratch built that awkward shape. Even my insanity has its limits. So I cut off the part I would use and then used the dimensions of upper strut to make a new one from aluminum tubing.
 

 

The main tube is 1/8" and the outer tube on the top is 9/32". The outer tube on the bottom is soda can aluminum cut into strips and wrapped around held in place with JB Weld. If you haven't used JB Weld it is used for gluing metal pieces and it works great and sets fast. You needed to scuff the mating surfaces before using this stuff, but once its on, it's really good stuff. The axle for making the gear retractable is solid 1/16" aluminum rod.

 



And now for the fun part. The torque links need a hinge point on the struts so that they will work properly. It needs to be thin, yet strong and unfortunately drilling into a thin piece of plastic didn't work. The material remaining after the hole is drilled is not strong enough to withstand the motion of the struts moving up and down, not that my model will be withstanding many hard landings, but still I'm over engineering this thing so I don't have to worry about it breaking later with no way to fix it. So to make this little hinge mounts, I took a strip of .020" plastic (remember the axles here are .020" diameter). Then I wrapped a thin strip of .010" thick plastic around one end end using a piece of .020" brass rod to preserve the hole. Sometimes it's better to built a hole than to drill one. I used my calipers as a vise to hold these parts together while the glue dried.

 

 =

 

 

As you can see the plastic needs a little filing to make it nice and flat. The overall thickness of this part is no more than .020", so it is quite a pain to file it down. I just pushed the part into my finger with the file and it worked fine. I left the "tail" on the part so I would have more material to grab while I positioned the mount on the strut. In this situation I found it easier to use a round file to make a divot in the plastic so it would fit around the strut. Use epoxy to glue these parts on. Once the glue was set, I carefully cut off the tail. I did each side one at a time. It took longer but it was the best way to assure the parts didn't shift while I was working with the other side. 

 

 

 

That finishes off the top part...the bottom part is to come...