Seat rail support interference with landing gear mount

I'm trying to get my landing gear mounts temporarily bolted into place so that I can drill the holes in the forward brace and the side flange. The left one fits pretty well, but the forward brace on the right one is hitting the seat rail support and that is preventing it from fitting properly.

Looking backwards from the forward brace backwards you can see where it is contacting the seat rail support.


Looking down at the side of the mount you can see the gap between the side flange and the side of the center section bulk head where the flange is supposed to be. It's about an 1/16" gap.


It's also possible that there is some interference on the bottom too. It kind of looks like there is but I won't know for sure until I fix the issue with the seat rail support.


I'm assuming I'll have to grind away some of the seat rail support so that the mount fits properly, but before I do that I wanted to find out if any others have had this problem and if that was how you fixed it.

Thanks

My QB kit showed up with the gear mounts installed. Both mounts were hard up against adjacent structure. Van's technical support said "Which is gonna wear faster, aluminum or steel? Don't worry about it."

Despite that advice, I removed the mounts (that's 10,000 bolts, by my estimate), filed/ground away the interfering structure, and reinstalled the mounts and all 10,000 bolts.

Kyle Boatright said:

that's 10,000 bolts, by my estimate

Click to expand...

Haha yeah that sounds about right. Nearly every single one of those bolts is nightmare to get into the hole too.

I would much rather have just a little bit of clearance between the parts as well. I'll probably remove just a tiny bit of the flange on the left side of the plane (where the landing gear mount actually fits but makes contact with the mount). The right side might take quite a bit more filing/grinding to make everything fit though.

tims88 said:

Haha yeah that sounds about right. Nearly every single one of those bolts is nightmare to get into the hole too.

I would much rather have just a little bit of clearance between the parts as well. I'll probably remove just a tiny bit of the flange on the left side of the plane (where the landing gear mount actually fits but makes contact with the mount). The right side might take quite a bit more filing/grinding to make everything fit though.

Click to expand...

Some of the structure in mine was actually so tight against the gear mounts, the structure was deformed. So relieving 1/16" (for instance) still left it hitting the mount. That wasn't acceptable to me, so I relieved things further.