Landing wheels
TLDR
- Assembled both landing wheels
Detail
The wheels came half-assembled but the inner tube is not inside the outer wheel, so the whole assembly needs to be taken apart and reassembled to put everything back correctly.
Step 1 Taking the wheel apart
I first took off the cotter pin and removed the axial bearings.
Then I removed the hex bolts holding the two wheel halves together.
I made a small mistake here. The only bolts I needed to remove are the ones NOT going through the wheel hub. There are three of them. The three on the hub do not need to be removed.
I removed one of them before realizing that was unnecessary. So now I have to buy some hex bit that fits my torque wrench and re-torque it.
Step 2 Put one half of the wheel to outer tube
I am not sure if I am supposed of fully sit wheel into the tyre, but I just couldn’t do it. So I pushed the wheel as far into the tyre as possible, but it’s still far from fully seated.
So I decided to change my strategy. I will just let it half sit into the tyre, and do the same with the other half. Then I will use the bolt to hold them together and just start inflate the inner tube. Hopefully the pressure will push the tyre out and make the wheel fully sit into the tyre.
Step 3 Putting the inner tube into outer tube
So once I put the first half of the wheel in position, I slightly inflated the inner tube and pushed it into the tyre, and made sure the value lined up with the red dot on the tyre.
Step 4 Closing the two wheel halves back
Then I closed the other wheel half. While holding the two pieces by hand, I put on the 3 bolts and threaded them slowly and evenly so the two halves closed without pinching the inner tube.
Step 5 Inflate the tube
Once the wheel is closed, I started to pump air into it.
Once it’s a little inflated, I started to bounce the tyre as hard as I can on the ground to “knock the tyre loose”. This is a trick I learned from my dad. Apparently they install tyres this way in the old days in China :-O It actually worked better than I thought. The gap between the wheel center and tyre closed significantly with just a few bounce.
I pumped more air and bounced some more. Eventually the gap is gone and the wheel started to look like a wheel.
