Posted Tuesday, May 5, 2009 @ 01:00 PM
Hi Guys,
I´m back with more outrigger questions. I had a failure of the wing fitting reminding of the problems Donald reported in a previous thread that unfortunately went away with pictures and everything when the site had a problem. More about that with pictures later in another thread.
The topic I wanted to discuss here is the length of the outriggers. As Eugenio pointed out this is highly important, since a longer outrigger is more likely to hit the ground before you slowed down to taxi speed. This will make the bending loads much higher and then something has got to give. Bob mentioned 43-44 cm from wing underside to wheeltip on the RF 4, and on drawing 4-42-50 it looks to me the RF 5 has about the same 40+ cm (the rod 50 cm + the wheel ca 10 cm minus 17 cm (the rod inside the wing fitting) plus about 3 cm (the fitting protrudes below the wing undersurface)= about 45 cm from wing undersurface to wheeltip. This would mean I have had too long outriggers, which could explain my frequent fractures.
Eugenio recommended to make the outriggers "shorter", but there is probably a limit to how much sidewise tilt you want, the main gear might take punishment and you put more load on the lower outrigger which at least on the RF 5 b is a factor since the wing "overhang" is longer.
Apart from the drawing above I haven´t found any reference to this. So what´s your opinions and if anyone has the drawings would you care to check the length of the original outrigger?
Take 5(b) just 4 fun/ Jörgen