First powered gear swing | 9.26.2020

There's still two sort-of competing standards in aviation between 14v electronics and 28v electronics. The Stabells (who owned the kit before us) had set everything up for 28v systems, because the DeltaHawk that they planned to install worked exclusively off 28v. There's good arguments for each, but I would say that a majority of aircraft still use 14v. We decided to go with 14v systems because parts are slightly cheaper and it's easier to interface with other electronics. This meant that we'd need to re-fit any electrical "stuff" that had been purchased in 28v. Namely, that included the electronic gear control "gold box" and hydraulic pump.

I talked to the factory, who sent me on to Wayne Lanza at Composite Designs. He's the original designer and producer of the gear control system. After a quick chat, I sent the old gold box and pump away to him to convert back to 14v. Wayne was awesome to work with, and turned our equipment around pretty quick. He swapped the pump for a 12v one and upgraded our control board to the latest revision at 12v as well. Once we received the landing gear... gear back, we installed it, temporarily wired up the switches, and cycled the gear 10+ times. Lots of props to the Stabells, as they had the gear system tuned pretty much perfectly, which is a tricky job. The gear system is a big portion of the install and we wouldn't really need to touch much... so we thought.

After cycling the gear a bunch, I noticed hydraulic fluid underneath the nose gear cylinder. I had hoped that it was simply a loose fitting, but on further inspection, the cylinder was leaking out the front seal and would need to be rebuilt. Likely it was just sitting for nearly 15 years that did the seal in. Easy enough to order a rebuild kit from the factory.

Also, I had previously talked to Scott at the factory and mentioned that I had two nose gear springs/struts for some reason. He asked the colors and I told him that one of them was white and one was brown. He told me that I'd need to replace the white one if that was the one installed, because those had essentially been a bad batch of springs while they were trying to find a good replacement for their old manufacturer. They just didn't have enough spring pressure in them and it resulted in a few issues. As luck would have it, the white one was installed, so I removed it to swap in the brown one. (Editor's note: this should have been really simple, but ended up turning into the biggest nightmare so far with the kit. More on that in future posts.)

Good on left, bad on right. (Spoiler alert, they're both bad.)

- Jeff