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Fitting Grove airfoil legs, question about crossmember edge distance

N546RV

Well Known Member
So today I got to work aligning my Grove airfoil legs. Currently I've doing a ballpark-ish alignment so I can mark the aft LG crossmember for trimming to clear the outboard brackets (though I still had the measurement from each leg to the aft plumb bob within the 1/4" tolerance called out in the manual).

Now, my understanding is that the outboard brackets for the Grove gear are larger than the factory ones, and thus more trimming of the crossmember is required. The concern I have regards the distance between the cut line I've marked and the outboardmost rivet hole for the F-850 bottom skin. The right side is OK (but just barely), but on the left side I'll end up with about 3/32 edge distance. Here's a look at the marked cut lines:

IMG_7003.jpg


My initial feeling (key word: feeling, ie unsupported by much of anything) is that this should be a low-stress area, and the edge distance shouldn't be an issue. Especially since the alternative would be to compromise the gear alignment (the result would be a touch of toe-in; I haven't done any calculations to quantify how much it'd be).

So I suppose I have two questions:

  • Did you other Grove gear folks end up with similar issues?
  • Does it seem plausible that the compromised edge distance here isn't a huge deal?

I suppose worst case, I could add an extra rivet between those two holes, but I really kinda think it'd be unnecessary. And I might want those 0.2 grams of useful load down the road...

:p
 
Yes mine were cut pretty close like this as well.

In the case of the nutplate, it's just to hold on the cover so I wasn't too concerned about edge distance of the one rivet.

For the other lone rivet hole, you can always add a new rivet hole a little bit further away if you want. I considered this but by the time I got around to putting the bottom skin on it wasn't as big of a concern to me.

Build on!
 
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