The landing gear was built per plans by Michael.
Again I came along and took it all apart. Notice a pattern? The first thing to go was the plans Cleveland brakes. I sold them off to a guy building an RV (or was it a Long EZ? I forget.) I then purchased the Matco WHLW51LXT high torque brakes. I think the price difference at the end of it was about $250. These actually have the stopping power to haul the Cozy to a stop from a full speed, max gross abort situation. It was relatively simple to re-cut the bottom of the gear leg to accommodate the Matco brake caliper. A carbide bit on a pneumatic die grinder made short work of that. Then I made heat shields out of 0/063" aluminum using a pattern made by Bernie Siu.
The last thing to do was to add the mount for the wheel pants. I made up an AutoCAD drawing, cut it up on the band saw and sanded the edges smooth.
The next modification was to rip out ALL of the Nylon brake lines in the plane. Those went straight in the trash, and were replaced with aluminum hard lines in the fuselage, with stainless and braided Teflon lines from the master cylinders to the hard lines, and again from the hard lines down the gear legs to the calipers. I documented all of the parts required to do this in the Cozy FAQ for Chapter 13, which can be found here.
The final change for this chapter was to add a main gear leg fairing. The plans landing gear strut is quite thick, and because of the sweep forward, it is at a relatively high angle of attack, especially when you consider the plane cruises with the longeron 1.5-2 degrees nose up. To correct this I made an AutoCAD drawing of the gear leg at the top and bottom. I fit a NACA 00 series airfoil, and I believe I uses a NACA 006 at the top and a NACA 0021 at the bottom. Both are a little thinner than optimal according to Hoerner, but I liked the look of a slightliy wider fairing, so I pay the price in a little skin friction drag. I think set the plane up with the longeron 1.5 degrees nose high, and fit a template to measure how far down the gear leg fairing needed to be rotated.
Of course at the bottom there is no adjustment, since the gear there is actually correctly angled to the wind. So, the foam core was to be twisted by the amount needed to correct the angle of incidence at the root. Here I cheated and simply sent the files to Stephen at EurekaCNC. He CNC hot wire cut the cores for me.
This is now a product you can buy from Stephen.
To put them on first I made the root fairing end. This was just done by building up a duct tape spacer between the gear leg and the fuselage and laying up BID over the top.
Then I microed the gear leg fairings to the gear strut, making sure to level everything and line it all up properly.
I only cut it into 5 sections, but I recommend that folks cut them into at least 8 or 10 so that the transitions are not so stark. It later took a lot of filling and sanding to get them smooth.
A shop vacuum and a bag made quick work of holding the fairing tight to the strut while the micro cured.
They came out great. A 2-3 BID wrap, fill, sand, and prime was all that was left to do.
The landing brake is per plans, with the manual system that Michael built ripped out, and a Firgelli Automation actuator in its place. I actually did this twice, because after putting the first one in I made the decision that I wanted to have position feedback, so I ripped that one out and put in one that has a potentiometer for feedback. That unit is a little longer so I had to move the seat-back mount up a bit.
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