Once the forward spring interior attach bracket is put in place, I needed to fashion the forward and aft spring spacers. These are blocks of aluminum stock that need to be conformed to the lower fuselage profile and tapered enough to allow the tailwheel springs to sit parallel to the waterline. Easier said than done.
Despite my best efforts, I could not get the springs to align with the waterline without leaving a significant gap between the upper spring and the fuselage near the rear of the fuselage. After scouring the GlastarNet forums, a common theme emerged; I needed to abandon the notion of setting the tailwheel springs parallel to the waterline and just set it all up so the rake & trail of the tailwheel was positive and not "flat or trailing".
So after much experimentation, I managed to nail this down. My final solution was to reverse the slope of the forward spring spacer (it now slopes up toward the rear) and then create a wedge interior to the forward bulkhead attach bracket to keep the bolt-up square. I then added a 1/4" thick spacer below the prescribed rear spacer to take up the small remaining gap between the springs and the fuselage. This worked really nicely with the factory rear spring attach bracket, though I did need to hogg out some of the DMB cloth under the interior receptacle.
So ends Part II. Now on to the really fun part...mounting up the tailwheel.
