I'm going to talk to my mechanic tomorrow but he is more of a Supercub guy. First I found the cracked torque plate on the McCauley brakes. Ordered new axles and bolts from Yingling and brakes from Alaska. Got everything today and things are not going back together right in my opinion. There is a gap at the rear of the axle to landing gear when I put the shims and washers back just like they came off. Looks to me like it has never been tight from the looks of the shims and one of the old bolts had a shoulder kinda cut into it so it didn't come out very easy. Big wedge to the front and taper to the back with two shims. I took one of the shims out thinking then the bolts won't be trying to bend and get in a bind. Still a gap. Any of the mechanics on here run into this issue. I know what the torque for the bolts is and it isn't very much. Thanks for any ideas.




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Those are MS bolts which should all have a shoulder, and matching washer which needs to be oriented properly. You probably already knew that. It seems like if the two rear bolts were loose it would have been obvious during disassembly.

Looks to me that the face of the shim isn’t flat, hence only 3 holes being in contact instead of 4. Do you have a granite block or similar to put it on to see?

eskimo77 over on Supercub told me how to do it and it worked. Bottom two are NAS146-39 and NAS 145-38 on top. I did get some new countersunk washers from my mechanic today instead of using the old ones. Was surprised to find out the bolts do bend.

Good idea getting rid of the McCauley brakes. Had one come apart on a 185 once on roll out. Glad it was on grass.

Yes. The bolts do bend when tightened. How much depends on how much shim is required. When setting wheel alignment and adding the TrickAir ski axles to my airplane I learned that. We fit everything up with some used bolts, then measured and ordered the correct length of bolts and installed them once so that they wouldn’t be exposed to any additional stress or bending during additional removal or installation steps.

With the TrickAir Skis there are shim packs inside and out on the gear leg, so the total bolt length and variation are greater, accentuating the issue.

I can second that the bolts 'may' have a gap by the time you get the wheel alignment set up. One or more can end up with a gap and I've seen the necking on the bolts when removing them. Like the prior post I ended using old bolts to set the alignment - which took four tries to get dialed in - and then used new bolts on the final installation. I had installed new gear legs and had to redo the alignment, the variations and number of shims possible was a little surprising. I think I could have pulled the final shim stack off, measured the four corner dimensions and figured out how the get the same angles using a thinner stack up of shims. I only had what I had though. Just my two extra cents.