Rigging the Main Landing Gear

In previous post I discussed how the SBD landing gear retracts into its wing recess:

Figure 81-1 Landing gear retraction in the SBD Dauntless

In principle, it is simple: the landing gear leg rotates by 90⁰. However, the parts responsible for shock strut shortening during this movement increase mechanical complexity of this assembly. The figure above does not even show the deformations of the brake cable, which follows the shock strut piston movements.

For some scenes I will need the landing gear extended, while for the others – retracted. In practice, moving/rotating each part individually to “pose” my model would be a quite time-consuming task. That’s why I created a kind of “virtual mechanism”, which allows me to retract/extend the landing gear with a single mouse movement.  In the previous post I already presented its results in this short video sequence. In this post I will shortly describe how I did it.

Details of the Main Landing Gear

The SBD shock absorbers had to disperse a lot of the kinetic energy of landing aircraft, minimizing the chance that the airplane accidentally “bounce” back into the air. (This is a key requirement for the carrier-based planes). For such a characteristics you need a relatively long working span between the free (i.e. unloaded) and the completely compressed (i.e. under max. load) strut piston positions. Indeed, you can observe that the Dauntless landing gear legs are much longer in the flight than in their static position on the ground (Figure 80‑1):

Figure 80-1 The fully extended shock strut

The working span of the SBD shock strut piston was about 10” long, while the difference between the static and the free (extended) piston positions was about 7.5”.

Forming the Main Landing Gear

I published my previous post a month ago, but the current stage of this project – detailing – requires less frequent reports. (Otherwise the posts would become rather monotonous: week after week they would describe making similar things, using the same methods). I started this last phase of the Dauntless project by recreating its main landing gear. First, I had to finish it, then I am able to write about this process. Thus I will describe it in this and next two posts. (I will publish them in a short sequence, week after week).

The retractable main landing gear of the SBD was probably a direct descendant of an experimental solution used in the Northrop 3A fighter prototype. In general, it looks quite simple:

Figure 79-1 Main landing gear of a restored SBD-3