Small Scale Military Headquarters

I was impressed by the suggestions for someone else's Avenger wing fix, so here's my dilemma: how to fix a broken rear landing gear on my 21C P-47.

There appear to be two plastic tabs sticking inward from the sides of the rear fuselage. Two nubs on the rear landing gear are meant to push past these tabs and then hold in place. One of the plastic tabs snapped off while lowering the rear gear, so now my P-47 has to make landings on its tail .

Any suggestions on a good fix? Super-gluing the tab back into place doesn't seem like a viable option -- the pressure exerted by the landing gear pushing past the tab would surely just snap it back off.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

It looks like you are just going to have to super glue it and raise the landing gear. Or you could find some way to keep the weight of the rear end of the plane. Dont worry i know what you are going through Good lcuk

You could try some sort of brace to hold the landing gear in the extended position. A piece of wood cut to the proper length (like a dowel or even a chopstick) could fit into the upper part of the rear landing gear strut. That part is hollow and should hold the stick. The other end of the wood piece can then be wedged into the upper part of the fuselage just above the landing gear.

I did something similar on my BBI Zero before I figured out that its tail wheel could lock

tmanthegreat wrote:You could try some sort of brace to hold the landing gear in the extended position. A piece of wood cut to the proper length (like a dowel or even a chopstick) could fit into the upper part of the rear landing gear strut. That part is hollow and should hold the stick. The other end of the wood piece can then be wedged into the upper part of the fuselage just above the landing gear.

I did something similar on my BBI Zero before I figured out that its tail wheel could lock

Hmmm...that idea might just have potential! It's cheap, simple, and probably very effective - those are the best kind!

If I'm envisioning what you are describing correctly, the end result would be much like the way the front landing gear on the Admiral Me-262 is held in place, right? (If you don't have that plane, the front gear swings down, and then a separate strut swings down behind it and wedges into place, going from the gear to the "ceiling" of the space where the gear is stored).

Great idea!

I would also like to thank VMF115 who talked me through some other options for my landing gear fix. I'd forgotten about epoxy, which hardens much more durably than super glue.

So my goal now is to recreate the tab in some fashion, using either plastic, styrene, or sheet metal, and then use 2-stage epoxy to secure it to the side of the fuselage. This will hopefully exactly mimic the original function.

If my skills aren't up to the task (there isn't a lot of room to work with w/o taking the whole rear fuselage apart and I have very clumsy hands!), then I'll probably use something along the lines that tmanthegreat suggested.

Thanks again everybody!

Never thought of that