Today is another step in getting the airplane on its gear…installing tubes in the tires, assembling the wheels, and prepping the gear leg axles. It was kinda neat to break open the box from Matco with all that gleaming precision-milled metal…

I’ve always paid someone to mount tires on our cars, so I had a small bit of a learning curve to traverse. Fortunately, Matco’s instructions are pretty good in this area. The only downside is that they don’t completely line up with Van’s instructions…you just have to interpolate between them to figure out what to do.

The tubes are thick and somewhat stiff, but a light coating of baby powder inside the tire makes inserting the tube much easier.

I neglected to take any pictures as I assembled the wheels. The only tricky part is making sure that the tube isn’t pinched between the wheel halves. Adding a little air to the tube pulls it into the tire a bit, and makes it easy to get the wheel halves to mate.

Each gear axle requires a brake mounting flange, and the bolt hole that secures the flange had to be opened up to accommodate an AN5 bolt. Fortunately, I had the right reamer for the job. Easy peasy!

Here’s the first take at mounting the brake flange. One of the hole had to be opened up to AN5, which was easy with the reamer. Yes, I know the brake flange is on backwards – I’ve fixed it!

The finished product…the gear legs are ready to go on the engine mount.