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Retracts PDF Print E-mail
Written by R/C Pilot   
Monday, 23 April 2007
There are a lot of poorly engineered and flimsy mechanical retracts out there, including some of the ones supplied in the popular ARF warbirds. A happy exception is the pair Hobby People supplies with their .46 size ARF P51D. They are the same ones that came with my Focke Wulf 190 that Hobby People was selling a few years ago. I've been using 2 pairs of these on the 2 FW 190's totaling 294 landings between them and both pairs are still working. Coleman has had, I believe, 2 seasons on his P51 and his are still good. I was able to order an extra pair as a "spare part for the Mustang", Model Tech Retracts, order # 170785, mfg part # 42066, $20 and they charged me only $3.50 for s & h on the small order. Nevertheless, the more working features you have on a model the more things there are that can go wrong. There are 8 million ways mechanical retracts can cause trouble. A lot of these have to do with the wire gear struts bending and/or twisting.

The danger comes from a retract unit hanging up and not reaching the full up or full down position. ANY TIME any part of the gear hits against something preventing the servo from moving all the way to the end of its travel, the servo motor stalls and the battery drains rapidly. Whenever the armature in an electric motor is prevented from rotating, the current flowing thru the windings increases drastically. This can run the battery down enough in a single flight to cause loss of control and a crash.

Most of these retract servos are not proportional servos; they use limit switches instead of feedback pots. That means you cannot adjust their throw from the transmitter. They cannot stop at any intermediate position; they can only go all the way to one end or all the way to the other. (Plug the retract servo into the aileron or elevator channel and see what happens when you move the stick the tiniest bit either side of neutral.) So you need to be VERY SURE nothing is preventing that servo from going all the way to its stop on both ends.

When you are building your model and installing retracts, DO NOT make your gear wells a tight fit around the wheels and struts. Give yourself a little leeway or you will be constantly fussing with them, re-bending the struts after all but the most perfect landings. You will very quickly tire of having to get them "just so" so they will go into the wells without hanging up on something. (ARF manufacturers who make gear well liners 1/16" bigger all around than the wheel, take note.)

If your retracts simply swing inward or outward (and don't use bellcranks to convert the motion to backward, like in the Corsair) you can measure the exact amount of throw the retracts need to to go from fully into uplock to fully into downlock. Just measure the total available movement of the unit's actuation arm. Example: one of my units' arm moves 13 mm for a full swing up or down and has an additional 6 mm at each end of this for the locks. Subtract a millimeter or so from each end - you want the retract to go fully into lock at both ends but not to jam against the stop. (13 + 6 + 6 - 2 = 23) Find an output arm for the servo that has holes not over 23 mm apart across the center and not less than, say, 21 mm; enough to cover the swing and get 4 mm into lock at each end. You don't want to be too marginal going into lock. It's annoying when your gears won't stay in downlock and keep collapsing when taxiing. Better yet, get a blank servo output disk and drill your own holes 23 mm apart (or the correct distance for your units) and install your screw-lock pushrod connectors (EZ Connectors) in them.
 
If you have a good multi meter or ammeter that has a range of, say, 0 to 1 or 0 to 2 amps and know how to use it, you can check the actual drain. Get a pair of red and black banana plugs that will plug into your meter and a servo extension; a longer heavy-duty one is more convenient. Cut the positive wire and strip insulation as necessary for the plugs. Put the red banana plug on the side of the cut that leads to the receiver (male) end of the extension and the black one on the side that leads to the female (servo) end. Now connect the banana plugs to the meter and the servo extension between your retract servo and the your receiver retract channel. Power up the transmitter and receiver and try the retract switch to see how much current the servo draws when it is moving. There should be no current flowing when it is not moving, that is when the retracts are fully up OR down. If there is a current draw, mechanically disconnect the retract units from the servo - take the output wheel off the servo but leave the servo connected electrically to the meter and receiver - and if the drain stops you will know that something needs adjustment; a retract is reaching the end of its throw before the servo is reaching the end of its throw, a wheel or gear leg is hanging up somewhere or the pushrods or something in the mechanical linkage is binding somewhere.

Of course a meter with this setup can also be used to check for total system drain by plugging your meter in between the battery and the receiver or to check any other servo for binding linkages .

On one airplane I used a separate battery and switch for just the retracts, so if there was ever a problem, only the retract battery would drain and the receiver and other servos would still function on the other battery.

It's always a good idea to check your batteries under load with a volt meter before every flight but with mechanical retracts there is even more reason to do it. I put a Voltwatch in the cockpit of some of my airplanes, where I can see it right before takeoff so it will alert me if the battery starts to go down faster than usual.

Make sure you have your ball-end Allen wrenches in your field box so you can re-tighten those set screws when the gear struts twist. Bolt-on axles can be another source of twisting. For a while, I believed in bending the bottoms of my struts for axles instead of using the bolt-on ones but there is another side to this coin. If anything on the gear leg is going to twist, it's easier to fix a twisted axle than when the whole leg twists up inside the retract pivot block and you have to remove or at least loosen the retract truck and pull it away from the wing to get at the set screw. However, there is something you can do to reduce the tendency for the gear leg to twist in the first place. When the wire gear leg is unbent and just runs in a straight line from the gear truck down to the axle (either  kind of axle), then the tire is offset by a half-inch or so to one side of the leg. That means the drag or impact forces are also offset to one side and act thru that half-inch as a moment arm trying to twist the leg. If, instead, you make bends in the leg above the wheel, more or less like the "half-fork" on a P51 gear leg, such that the upper part of the leg is now on a line with the center of the tire, then the backward forces (rolling drag or impact) are acting thru the center of the tire so there is no tendency for the leg to twist.

Something else to watch for that can stall the retract servo is the gear strut bending inward (when the gear is down) so the strut end or the tire hits against the top inside of the well on retraction. 

A few times I have thought about using a separate retract servo for each gear mounted close to the retract unit, instead of one servo in the center with long pushrods and a lot of complex bends. The short pushrod is much less prone to flexing and binding than the long one that already has to have bends to go around the tire and reach all the way to the servo. Now I see the giant Hangar 9 P47 has retracts with a servo mounted right on each unit.

A variation on this concept is the mechanical retract unit hooked up with a very short pushrod to an air cylinder mounted right next to it in the wing. This eliminates the retract servo entirely and all the fussing that goes with it. Now you've converted the mechanical retracts to air retracts and only need a small servo to operate the air valve. This, of course, assumes the mechanical retracts are good enough to be WORTH converting! Many ARF-supplied ones are not.

You still have to really want to see your airplane flying with the gear up to put up with all this. But, to some of us, a WWII fighter in the sky with the gear UP is a sight worth going to some effort to achieve. What I often do is to bring another fixed-gear airplane to the field with me that is simple and trouble free so I still have something to fly when the retractable is "down" for maintenance.
Last Updated ( Monday, 23 April 2007 )
 
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