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Main gear and wheel pant alignment.

WAM120RV

Well Known Member
First a little history.. I have a veer to the left on taxi, the faster the taxi the stronger the veer. It's all controllable with right rudder/tailwheel steering but has caught me out a couple of times on take off especial with a crosswind from the left. It's probably down to a worn bolt holding the tailwheel fork on allowing the wheel to move off 90degrees..... However.


I decided to check the main gear and found that with no weight on it there is about 15 degrees of toe in both sides....... Not good! When the weight is put onto the gear this becomes zero or a bit of toe out.

I have no idea how much the gear would toe out if I repositioned the gear to zero toe with weight off. I will experiment later today with this.

But, and this is the discussion point...... It seems to me that if we set the gear as per Van's instructions, with zero toe weight off, we would induce some toe out when the gear is loaded. If we then follow the instructions to align the wheel pants in the three point attitude weight on they would be offset going in in flight.

Why are we not setting up the wheel pants weight off so they have zero toe?

Am I missing something here?
 
My understanding is that you level the plane in flight attitude with gear in the air (no weight on gear) to align the pants.

On aligning the gear itself, that battle has been waged since before the primer wars started. The argument that makes sense to me is to have zero to slight toe *out*; logic is that if you have any toe-in, the tire will tend to 'dig in' and worsen any turning tendency in any turn.
 
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