Brass tubeing for struts?

Not being able to support their own weight?...That's urban legend...lol
The thing with brass tube is a bit of fashion and personal liking.....
Tried them once couldn't tell that I was majestically thrilled.
See for yourself.

I've seen this on various people's scratchbuilt stuff. Works great in theory if you can scratchbuild it.

Try this on some scrap landing gear.
- Get Brass tubing or rod of the right diameter
- Drill out the inside of your plastic landing gear. The difficulty here is drilling a concentric hole to the existing landing gear.
- Insert stiffening rod, fuse with superglue

Alternatively, you can just drill a tiny diameter hole and use finer wire for strengthening.

I have yet to use brass for interplane struts, prefering to use styrene there. But I have used brass several times for replacement struts in landing gear assemblies. You can get both brass (Strutz) and styrene (Contrail) from Roll Models.com. (The brass units are a heck of a lot more expensive)

I once made a set for Airfix's old 1/24th scale P-51 because I wanted working oleo struts. Came out pretty good except I didn't make brass scissors and the plastic ones broke. Never got around to making brass scissors. I used the springs from the bomb release part of Monogram's old 1/32nd P-51 kit for the struts inside the brass tubing. I think Trumpeter has working struts on thier 1/24th kit except it's all plastic. Usually the weakest part is the curved fork on nose or tail wheels. The struts are usually more than strong enough.

You can stiffen the landing gear legs with piano wire, the stuff used for flying models. It is very stiff and difficult to cut or bend.
The difficulty is drilling straight and deep enough. The chromed brass tubing works well for oleo legs, and it comes in a wide variety of sizes. Again it should be easy to find at a shop that sells flying models, or rail road supplies. rangerj