The Little World

…Doesn’t mean you have to follow them.

This might be the phrase best suited to the stage of building that we are up to today – the landing gear on the A-20 Havoc. It is tricycle gear and the original designers of the ship wanted to make the wheels and tyres disappear from the airstream entirely whilstin flight – they had visions of fabulous aerodynamics and high speed. None of that early British or American business of part of the tyre protruding into the slipstream and ruffling the air.

That’s all very well, but if you want the tyre to pop into the nacelle under a door and at the same time be capable of coming down far enough to suspend the fuselage and clear the propeller tips, you either have to have a very long leg and a very long nacelle to fit it into, or a rotating mechanism to twist the wheel and tyre mechanism 90º…or you adopt the ruse seen in the Havoc.

Basically you build a scaffold structure of tubing inside the nacelle to take the point of rotation of the landing gear leg to the bottom of the housing. This allows a shorter leg to tuck in backwards while still dropping far enough down to clear the bottom of the ship.

The disadvantage of this is the flimsiness of the cage, scaffold, or whatever else you call the structure. In this model it was very flimsy indeed and needed careful assembly, white glue re-enforcement, and about a quart of disparaging language. I do not know the telephone number of the factory in the Czech republic but that was a good thing…

I wondered in the end how many real-life Havocs came in to land and kept on descending as the cage crumpled up when the stress hit it…

I will go along with the gag for now, but if it proves too fragile I am going to substitute a pair of bent SS wires attached to the the wings and say to hell with the scale thing.