Apr 17, 2024     Which tailwheel tire? - (2 hours)       Category: Landing Gear

A year or so ago, I bought a Condor 2 fork, lightweight wheel and absolutely bald tire from a guy on VAF. I had slapped it on the plane before moving it to the airport because the 6" tire gives more ground clearance back there ad I was worried about dragging belly antennas when it was being loaded on the truck.

I ordered a new tire which has been on the shelf for a while so while I was working on the rudder and tailwheel steering, it seemed like a good time to deal with that.

I broke down and changed the tire but used the same tube because it was in good shape. I was originally planning to go back to the hard rubber 5" tire that Vans supplies during flight test and maybe go back to this one when I get a bit more comfortable with the airplane. I may still do that, and in fact the smaller Vans tire will fit the same fork, so it would be easy to do.

But out of curiosity, I weighed them both and discovered that the 6" setup is actually 4oz lighter than the solid Vans tire/wheel combo. I didn't take the forks off the plane to weigh them, but I sort of think that the condor 2 is lighter than the vans fork as well. Even if it's not, 4oz is nothing to sneeze at. The lever arm is about 250" back there and combined with the lighter weight old white fairings I'm using, this tailwheel will take almost 1/2 a pound off of the tail of the plane.

I've got a big heavy engine up front, but I've also got a fancy lightweight prop, so I really don't know if I'm going to be tail heavy, nose heavy, or somewhere in between. But I do know that from a W&B perspective, 1/2 lb off the tail has the same net effect as deleting 1.5 lbs of gas on this airplane, so unless I need the weight in the tail to shift the c.g, I think I may just leave it like this for a while and see how I like it. The only downside I can see is that since it's an actual tire with a tube and not just rubber donut, I could get a flat back there.

I think I'll wait and see how the preliminary W&B comes out to make a decision about this.

  Apr 17, 2024     Rigged tailwheel steering - (10 hours)       Category: Landing Gear

Yesterday I attempted to install the steering chains per print and they were rubbing on the bottom rudder fairing at full rudder deflection. Plus they were clipped onto the rudder horn and the tailwheel horn with those spring clip abominations. once you spring them open enough to install there's not a good way to smoosh them back together, so you end up having to run safety wire around them to make sure they stay put.

Plus, when Robert August had his RV6, we noticed during the condition inspection that they were eating their way through the rsoft aluminum of teh rudder horn. No thank you.

I did some research last night and discovered a picture of Vans own RV7 demonstrator that has been modified to use AN42B eye bolts at that location, which saves the rudder horn and also drops the fwd end of the chain about 1/2", which is enough to eliminate the rubbing issue. The phrase "practice what you preach" comes to mind here.

The problem is, those AN42B eyebolts are $13 a pop at spruce, and I need 4 of them. with shipping, probably $70, which seems a bit spendy for this use.

This morning, I ran down to the yard store to see if they had any in their surplus hardware bins and it was my lucky day! I found a whole bin of them that were the wrong length and drilled through the threads but who cares, loose hardware at the yard store is $12 a POUND. I picked up a handful of bolts, some Axle nuts cotter pins and a few other odds and ends. Instead of $70, I walked out with a paper bag full of goodies that only cost me $6 bucks. I love the yard store!

My bench vise is in my garage and the plane is obviously not, so I was unsure how long these actually needed to be. When I got home, I clamped them in the vise and got out the cheap harbor freight tap and die set I had at the house and cut threads down to within about 3/16" of the head. Once I did a trial fit on the plane, I determined that 5/8" was plenty, so I cut them down to that length with my dremmel. Take that Aircraft Spruce :)

I fastened the springs directly to the eye bolts at the tailwheel, and used stainless chain add-a-links rated for 300 lbs at the rudder. On the rudder end I also had to enlarge the hole in the eyebolts slightly to get the threaded end of the link thru it. I don't recall what size drill bit I used, but the increase was pretty insignificant.

So, When it comes time to paint the plane, You can get the rudder off without scratching the heck out of the horns with those spring clips, it doesn't rely on a big wad of safety wire to keep it from falling apart, and it looks about a million times better that the crappy spring link/scratched rudder fairing abomination that Van's has in their drawing but doesn't even follow on their own demo airplanes. Best of all, it was on the cheap



So between yesterday and today all of that monkey motion took a while but the result turned out pretty nice if I do say so myself. The chains have a little bit more slack than I would like, but if I take out another link they will be too tight. This chain has a tendency to stretch in use, so after a few hours I suspect it will have grown enough that I can take out a link at that point and they will be just about perfect.

  Nov 14, 2023     wheel pant fiberglass shims. - (3 hours)       Category: Landing Gear

Over the last week or so I've been working on the windshield fairing. Since that process requires lots of downtime waiting for epoxy to dry, I was looking for something else occupy myself with at the same time and decided to come back to the gear pants.

The way Van's has you do this is to match drill the pants to the attach brackets, then fill up the gaps with epoxy so when you tighten the screws down you don't end up with the pant craters around the attach points from cinching the screws down.

This sound good in theory, but its not exactly easy to get epoxy in that gap when the pants are installed. Honestly, I don't know how long it would have taken me to figure out a method for this on my own. Fortunately, I ran across a solution on somebody else's build log.

I covered the mounting brackets with packing tape and turtle wax for a mold release, making sure to cover the brake caliper and anything else I didn't want epoxy on. I then installed the wheel pants. I snugged down the axle bolt, but only installed the screws into the mounting brackets on the inboard side enough to hold the pants into position, but not so far that they started to close the gap and deform the wheel pants. I coated the nut plate threads and screws in boelube so as to make sure and not get them epoxied in place.

I had previously drilled extra holes around the screw holes so I could inject epoxy/flox into teh gap through the holes.

I mixed my epoxy/flox slurry as thick as I dared and injected it through the extra holes via a big livestock vaccination syringes from my local Atwood's farm supply.

Once that had dried, I took everything apart and ground down the extra epoxy that had oozed out past the flange edges.

I'm happy with how one side turned out, the other side not so much and will eventually redo it.

In fitting these, I also noticed that the aft tip of the right wheel pant seems to be sitting about 1/2 inch lower that the left. I don't know if this is just because the garage floor isn't exactly level or if I made a mistake somewhere when I was originally drilling the pants to the brackets. I also don't know if thats enough delta to even be noticeable either visually or aerodynamically on those teardrop shaped pressure recovery pants. I suspect the answer is no in both cases, but I'n going to ask around,. I'll also check this again when I get the wheels off the ground to fit the gear leg fairings the difference may disappear at that point.

I had pre

  Oct 24, 2023     Bled brakes - (3 hours) Category: Landing Gear

Serviced brakes with 5606 from the bottom up using a borrowed pressure pot. Basically the garden sprayer method. I replaced the cap on the Vans reservoir with a barbed brass fitting and a clear vinyl tube to a 16 oz water bottle. I started out with a very light pressure and slow flow to gently push the air bubbles in front of the fluid back up to the reservoir.

Lots of bubbles at first and I thought I got all the air out of the lines because I couldn't see any more bubbles in the translucent lines, and the clear vinyl line to the catch can, but the pedals were still soft.

I did both sides a second time, but this time I pumped the pressure up and shoved it through there at a rate that filled up the 16 oz bottle in about a minute. The higher velocity carried a bunch more bubbles out that were presumably hiding in the master cylinders and the pedals firmed up nicely.

I removed the barb fitting from the reservoir which was full to the brim at this point and pulled the level down to approx 1/4" below full per the instructions from matco then installed the vented cap.

I spilled a bit of fluid on the floor so after securing everything I rolled the plane forward and put oil dry on the floor, which I'll clean up tomorrow. I also washed off the tires where they had some fluid on them with soapy water.

I didn't take any pictures because there isn't really anything complicated about bleeding the brakes, just takes some time, especially if your doing it by yourself, and its a bit messy.

  Dec 14, 2022     MLG wheel pants - (28 hours)       Category: Landing Gear

So- Now I know why everybody kicks this can down the road as long as possible. Not exactly a fun project. HOWEVER, I strongly recommend knocking this out before you get the engine and wings on, because it required a ton of on and off for trimming and adjusting, and it would really suck to have to do these while scrunched up under the wing.

It took several days to get this done. Including research and building fixtures I think I've worked on it about 28 hours over the last week.

Step one was to true up the seam between front and back halves. The front half has a scribe line about 1/4" from the edge, but several people told me that they ignored the scribe line and just trued them up with local sanding to get the seam matching, so I went that way and it worked out well. On both pants there is a slight gap on the lower inboard side. If the intersection fairing doesn't cover it up, I'll do some fiberglass magic to fill it later.

Need to get the weight off wheels and get the plane level. This means that I need a tail stand about 42" tall. All the commercial solutions that I found at harbor freight or Lowe's seemed a little spindly when you start getting them that tall, so I spend a couple of hours building a robust stand out of 2x4s. I also built a jig to capture the wheel pant that has lag screws on each corner so that I can adjust for level and tilt and it will stay where I put it. Total cost was about $45 for supplies, and I think it was money well spent. One casualty of this project; I dropped my 20 year old plastic speed square that already had a crack in it. When it hit the floor it absolutely shattered. replacement = about $7 at harbor freight :)

Leveled the fuse with the tail on the stand and my engine hoist lifting the engine mount. Leveled longitudinally easily, laterally by shimming with blocks under the wheel opposite the one I was working on, then used a ratchet strap pulling down on 40 lbs of free weights to keep it from swaying side to side on the hoist.

No real secret or shortcuts to this that I can see. Other than building a fixture to hold the pant and eventually using a laser to define tilt and parallel I just followed the written instructions.

Dropped a couple of plumb lines to find the centerline, then measured out and drew some reference lines on the floor to make sure I got the pants parallel to the centerline of the fuselage. In my case, this was 37.25" from centerline, but because the wheels are canted, this measurement will vary depending on how high off the floor the wheels are. Once I had this line defined, I lined up a laser on it, with the tilt defined by the tire tread grooves.

After everything was defined, I did what seemed like 100 iterations of on/off to trim enough to get clearance for the wheel and axle. All trimming was done with my dremmel with an abrasive disc and a flapper sanding bit.

Match drilled the holes for the mounting brackets using magnets, That went well on the first one, but when I moved to the other side, one of the holes was off about 3/16" I think what happened was that even though the magnets are round, they still have poles and they weren't quite lined up because the inner one was latched on to the nutplate with the poles sideways. Lesson learned, If you use the magnets, make sure you wiggle them around a bit to make sure they are actually stuck on the center of the hole.

I started at about 0700 this morning and finished the first one about 1300. As with most things, the second one went much faster since I now knew what the heck I was doing, and I knocked it out in a couple of hours.

One other thing- I had previously installed flex brake lines and the hole in the pant would need to be pretty big to accommodate the radius where it comes off the caliper. I don't have intersection fairings yet and am unsure how big that hole can actually be without causing problems. I pulled the lines off and think I may just go old school with bent solid lines per print. I've got plenty of tube to make them from, so I'm going to sleep on it.

  Dec 07, 2022     MLG Leg fairings - (6 hours)       Category: Landing Gear

Trimmed & fabricated the gear leg fairings. I read through Vans instructions then watched Karetakers video tutorials and the takeaway from both is that the biggest thing is to make sure you don't build them with a twist.

I eyeballed a centerline on the leading edge, taped the template using that line as a reference, then confirmed that it was close by measuring the long trailing edge of the template to the mold lines already on the part.

It's definitely possible to induce twist in these if you wiggle the trailing edge the wrong way. I brought them into the kitchen and taped the trailing edges with them laying flat on a granite countertop. Doesn't get much flatter than that. I insured that there was no twist by simply rifle-sighting through them with the chord line aligned vertically with a window frame then moving my head up enough that I could reference the trailing edge from the outside. I've tried to capture that with a picture below.

I didn't get a picture of it, but when I laid out the piano hinges on these, I just nested them in the apex of the trailing edge, marked them, then brought them away from the trailing edge 1/8" so that I would have to squeeze the trailing edges together slightly to get the pin in. I think that 1/16" would have worked as well and would probably have been plenty.

I still have some housekeeping to do with these; I have the finish the fingers that the hose clamp attached to at the top, finish sand the trailing edges, and make some adjustments to the brake lines/lower opening of the fairing due to a little interference between the two.

Oh, before I forget. I needed to make these about 1" shorter than the template due to interference on the lower end.

Other than that, these are basically done.

  Oct 28, 2022     brake lines in cabin - (4 hours)       Category: Landing Gear

The Vans way to do this is to fabricate hard brake lines from the firewall down the main gear legs secured with tape to prevent chafing, then a loop around the caliper to give it the ability to flex as the caliper slides in and out on the pins, then terminate in a B nut into an elbow at the caliper.

All well and good, but I elected to go with braided flex lines from TS flightlines and ordered them at the same time I got the custom lines from the pilot pedals to the parking brake valve. This will eliminate the big goofy loop of hardline at the caliper and allow me to remove the caliper without bending or having to crack the lines and then re-bleed them for a brake pad change.

Got the lines off the shelf them and started looking at this, then realized I needed to make a couple of adjustments; These lines terminate at an elbow at the caliper, and there isn't enough room to screw in an elbow with the caliper installed. The flange to which the wheel pant attaches is in the way of screwing it in. Also, the steel ID tag that TS flightlines puts on these cables is about 6" from the firewall end. In my case that positioned it so that it could conceivably rub on the engine mount.

Removed the calipers and installed the elbows. These are pipe threads on the caliper side, so I gooped them per industry practice (goop starting a couple of threads from the end of the fitting to keep it from getting down into the caliper) using permatex #2. I clocked them inboard slightly so that the hose will clear the caliper.

Torqued the calipers on the axles to 100 "lb per Matco instructions for Nord-lock washers. The instructions that come with the wheels say that you can re-use the nord-locks as long as the shoulders aren't worn down enough to defeat the locking feature. They were seated when they came out of the box, and I've had them off twice since then, so that makes a total of 3 cycles so far. The lock feature seems to still be crisp, so I'm good with reusing them, but I suspect that I'll need to keep some of these on the shelf in the future.

I also took a pair of needle nose pliers and was able to loosen the hose ID tags and move them closer to the firewall B nut so that they can't rub anything. The rest of the line is covered in clear vinyl sleeve over the braid so no worries as long as that tag can't rub on anything.

It seems kind of shade tree to secure this to the gear leg with tape, but it's worked on thousands of RVs. I used silicone fusion tape and started with a full wrap around the gear leg then a couple of wraps around the hose in 5 locations. The whole thing gets covered by the gear fairings, so it just has to hold against vibration and flopping around.

The starboard side routing isn't as obvious. You could make it work by going either under or over the lower engine mount tubes as it travels across the firewall over to the starboard side gear leg. I went to VAF to see what most folks do here and spent about 90 minutes clicking on build logs. I determined that routing it on forward side of the tubes seems to be the most common routing, so that's what I went with.

The geometry of the routing causes it to be a little closer to the lip where the gear leg plugs into the socket on the engine mount than on the port side, so I sleeved it with a split length of vinyl tape held in place with an additional wrap of silicone tape in that area. It seems pretty unlikely that it will ever rub enough to amount to anything on either side, but unlikely isn't the same thing as impossible, so I may stand this off with a couple of adel clamps mounted butterfly style eventually. Nobody else seems to have had a problem with this, but I'm going to put it on my list of stuff to review.

I have a ton of adel clamps, but somehow I don't have an appropriate size hi temp clamp for the line, so I used regular black ones to get this all installed. I'll put more high temp ones on my list of stuff to order from spruce or just pick up the next time I'm in airparts. Sharp eyes may notice in the pictures below that he screws through the adel holding this line are in backward from normal convention, i.e. screws going in the hole top to bottom so that if the nut falls off the screw will stay in the hole. There isn't much room to get a screwdriver on it if you put it in the other way, and since I'm going to have these apart to replace with the correct adel clamp I'll see if I have enough room with a stubby screwdriver to correct the orientation at that time.

Torqued the lines at the calipers by snugging them finger tight then one more flat after that. They are just finger tight at the firewall because I need to be able to hold the fitting with a wrench on the cabin side to prevent it turning when I tighten these down and I can't reach that side with the upper skin checked on the airplane. I'll get that after I get the windshield trimmed and then get that skin back off the airplane.

  Oct 21, 2022     Installed brake calipers - (4 hours)       Category: Landing Gear

I had already attached the brake mounting flange to the axle via the U-403 axle flange as well as trimmed & demurred the wheel pant mounts and fabricated the associated spacers. With all that done, the first one went together really easily. No problems at all.

However, the starboard side was a little bit of a struggle. When I installed the caliper on the slide pins, it was tight. I could push it back and forth, but there was quite a bit of resistance. clearly something wasn't right. Long story short, I took it all apart and discovered that the ears on the U-403 were slightly warped, probably during welding. It was just a few thousandths, but it was enough that when you torqued the associated brake flange down, it put the pins in a bind.

Took that all apart and encouraged the ears on U-403 to get with the program via an aluminum drift and BFH while is was sitting in my bench vice. Only took a few taps to get it in good shape.

WARNING- It turns out it's possible to put this assembly together wrong and have everything still fit. When I put this back together on the bench, I got the brake mounting flange behind (ship side) the U-403 axle flange when it should have been outboard. I bolted everything up this way including calipers and it wasn't until I started looking at it in place that something didn't seem right. Referenced the other side and immediately saw what I'd done. I believe the down side of doing it that way wouldn't have been catastrophic failure, but instead, the caliper "float" would have been limited much more than by design and eventually things would have bound up or just stopped grabbing as the pads wore down.

Took it all back apart and re-assembled it the correct order/stackup. All good.

Drilled axles for cotter pin with a 90* drill motor first to #40, then took the nut off and upsized to #30

Few other things of note;

The two AN4 bolts that hold the pads on are now safetied with Nordlock washers, not safety wire. The instructions say 1/4" nordlock bolts get torqued to 100 in/lbs. That seems awfully high, so I called Matco and they verified.

Vans instructions tell you that you'll need to swap the bleeder fitting the other way on one of the calipers to make a left and right. On the ones I got, that had already been done out of the box.

Nordlocks get higher than standard torque

The wheels that come in vans finish kit now have a rubber chevron style integral grease seal and it takes a different tightening process that we're all used to. Basically, as spelled out in the installation instructions you rotate the wheel while tightening the nut until the seal stops spinning and then tighten it to the next locking feature. Since you're drilling the axle to match the holes already in the axle nut, you're basically left to you're own devices to figure out where this is.

From the point the seal stopped spinning, I went approx. 1 more flat and then drilled the holes so taht he pin would be vertical.

  Oct 20, 2022     installed main gear - (6 hours)       Category: Landing Gear

The instructions are basically a 1 liner; Insert gear leg into socket, install one bolt. done.

What they should say is: look all over Wichita for aeroshell 22. Ukraine war, covid, supply chain, whatever. Ultimately give up and use what Airparts is selling as a substitute, then pack wheel bearings, then spend several hours with emory cloth sanding off excess powder coat.

So, now that I've vented that, here's what happened. Evidently there's a shortage of grease, Who knew. Airparts told me they were struggling to get Aeroshell 22, but they had Royco 22CF which complies with the same mil-spec which qualifies as "or equivalent" under the matco manual.

Was somewhat surprised to unwrap these bearings and discover that they were 100% dry No protective grease, cosmoline, nothing. Thankfully they don't seem to have picked up any rust while they were sitting. Packed them by hand with royco, then set them aside and started working on gear legs.

I raised the front of the a/c about a foot with a lift sling laced through the engine mount and a cherry picker engine hoist.

Some guys evidently have no trouble with these, and some talk about having to hone the sleeves, ice bath the legs, all sorts of stuff.

In my case, The bolt holes in the socket were undersized, so I reamed so I could get a drift into it, and then honed to get rid of burrs and powder coat that had found it's way in there. The hone I somehow still own is a brake slave cylinder hone originally used to rebuild the drum brakes on a 1968 MGB I owned in college approximately 30 years ago. How is it that I knew exactly where that thing was, but I can't find the cleco pliers that were in my hand 30 seconds ago?

Anyway, trial fit of the left led revealed that it wouldn't slide up all the way. Several cycles of on off to determine where it was hanging up. Ultimately discovered that the powder coat abutting the lower bearing surface has a lip that conflicts with the socket. Spent about an hour with fine sandpaper and scotch bright removing paint. I didn't want to take off any more than necessary and leave bare metal sticking out the bottom of the socket, so it was very much a case of take a little off, trial fit, take a little more off, rinse repeat.

Ultimately ended up removing about 3/8" of powder coat on both the upper and lower sides of the lower bearing surface to get them to slide up far enough in the socket. Since the assembly is (hopefully) never coming apart again, I gave them a healthy dose of marine waterproof wheel bearing grease, coating the inside of the socket and bearing surfaces.

Of course, the second one went much faster.

Got a bolt in both sides, installed wheel fairing mounts on axles, then installed wheels. Also installed brake calipers, and discovered that the starboard one isn't sliding freely on the pins. Investigated and discovered that the backing plate that had brass bushings for the pins to ride in was riding up on some weld beads on the mounting flange on the axle. When you torque it down, there is enough flex that it's binding up the pins.

I dressed the welds a little bit with a jewelers file and they are better, but still not perfect. I was running out of time and didn't want to leave it swinging overnight, so I went ahead and put the wheel back on and put the gear on the ground fr the first time ever.

I still need to drill the axle nuts for cotter pins, so I think I'll take this back apart and see if I can get it fitting better/sliding freely while I'm doing that.

  Oct 17, 2022     installed tailwheel - (3 hours)       Category: Landing Gear

installed tailwheel spring, including measuring running torque of a new fiber lock nut at about 20 "lbs. Torque range for a AN4 is 50-70 "lbs so I torqued it to to 80 "lbs to account for nut torque, which means teh fastener is actually torqued to about 60 "lbs, which is smack in the middle of the specified range. This is standard industry procedure and Vans covers it in their build manual as well, but the question comes up on VAF quite a bit, so I'm specifically mentioning it here in case that might help out somebody reading this in the future.

The print calls for just a bolt, washer and castle nut thru the wheel, no spacers in this design. The wheel came with the bearings already pressed in and the felt like they were already lubricated, but they really don't spin very freely, maybe 1/2 to 3/4 of a revolution even before it's in the fork. Plus, when I was playing with this some beige flecks that looked like dried varnish came out of one of them, so I popped one out if the wheel and discovered that they are super cheap sealed chinese ball bearings. No way to pack them.

Likewise, there is a grease zerk in the wheel, but it doesn't have a spring check ball, just a hole all the way through that vents to the cavernous open center of the wheel. A guy would have to pump probably 1/2 a cartridge of grease into that thing to get grease anywhere near the back side of the bearings, and they're essentially sealed anyway. what the heck?

I verified with several people who have used this setup that teh bearings are prefabricated and sealed, and that the grease zerk is just a placebo. These bearings only cost $4 each from Vans and I found them for about the same price on Amazon. Guys just run them as is and replace them when they start to make noise.

This seems like a really mickey mouse setup but it's what I have on hand so thats what I'm using. I may upgrade to a better wheel with actual bearings at some point in the future depending on how long these last.

I also had to swap out for a thin washer to have any hope of getting a cotter pin in the hole without really cranking down on the nut and making the friction even worse.

Installed everything, torqued, adjusted & safetied as appropriate.

  Sep 17, 2022     wheels/tires & brake flanges - (8 hours)       Category: Landing Gear

couple of partial days work here. Built up the wheels without issue. Ran to the shop at work and borrowed a bottle of baby power to lube the inside of the tires, made tube insertion easy. can't get talc anymore because its a carcinogen. They use corn starch baby power now. worked fine.

Installed the brake caliper flanges on the axles. This has to be one of the worst documented assemblies on the whole airplane. With lots of scrutiny and playing with parts I finally figured it out.

FYI- the allen head screw that holds the flange on the axle is a special type of screw with a smooth shaft and a smaller coarse thread nut. Two of these screws came in hardware bag 1968-1 with the fuselage kit, which I thought was strange at the time. when I got the finishing kit, there were two more, along with nuts, & washers in bag 914-3, which was stapled to the bag the axle spacers were in. Clearly this is the bag for brake parts.

I asked on VAF what the two screws in bag 1968-1 were for, thinking that I had perhaps used the wrong hardware in a previous operation. Nobody had an answer, and lots of people had the same scenario. As of right now, nobody knows why we have 4 of these.

Note- the stackup on this includes 2 washers under the nut that are different sizes. The big on refits over the smooth shaft of the screw and the smaller steps it down for the threads. Hard to describe, but it would be easy to get the inner washer hung up on the shoulder where the threads end and bind it up in such a way that you're not actually torquing down against the collar. due diligence is required.

Also as part of this operation you make spacers out of hard aluminum tube to space the wheel part bracket away from the brake caliper. I have my doubts that aluminum is hard enough to hold appropriate clamping force against something that gets as much vibration and general abuse as a wheel pant. I'm going to keep an eye on this and if they start to loosen up over time I think I might remake these out of steel.

Had to relive some interference between the brake caliper and teh wheel pant mounting plate on both sides. accomplished with a rotary file.