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[quote=RV8JD;1364642]Here are some of your pics. I hope you weren't injured.
Hi Carl, came out of it without a scratch, surprising little damage which is a testament to the design of these aircraft.Replaced canopy,hor. stab and rudder,forward top skin,forward right side skin,shock load,new prop and hub and new nose gear leg.The other thing learned is that the canopy plexiglass is super strong and needed a few solid kicks to get out.This happened 4 years ago and 300 hours later and multiple landings on improvised strips the gear leg is holding up pretty good. I posted this to assure others with A models that in my opinion the original nose gear design does it's job well as long as one sticks to flying them as they're supposed to. |
Has anyone looked at the nose of a Piper Tri-pacer. it was one of the first Trikes. The wheel and tire are huge, the oleo strut is beefy and braced. A friend was in the short wing piper club told me how they tested it. back in the day. They hooked up a tractor and towed the plane 90 degrees to furrowed plowed field, quickly with heavy weights tied to the nose... You are not going to fold that up
Cessna's have strong gear but hard landings buckle the fire wall. Pacer is tube frame. ![]() |
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Damaged firewalls are just an additional part of the failure mode when the nose gear leg rips off of the engine mount. |
Classic Mount & Leg resale value?
Classic sounds so much better then OLD mount. A returned mount & leg gets you a $700 credit,this kind of sets the price for the rest of us unfortunately.Vans list is $1200 for the mount and $267.50 for the leg. If I upgrade to the new mount $3000.00 with the reuse of some of my parts. My kits are past the return time frame. I inspected the new mount and spoke to Mitch Lock at Oshkosh and have to agree. Its a better solution. So is converting back to conventional gear. I'd need to spend $500 for an upgraded tail wheel but get rid of the problematic steps,the heavy nose gear and the new heavy cost of the upgraded nose gear parts. I'll need a lot more tail wheel time in the book and more than likely pay a higher premium till I build hours.In the end it may balance out.Anybody want to swap out?
RHill |
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Originally Posted by Gabe View Post I've been following this thread with interest and would like to share my experience with my take on this. I had and still have the original nose wheel design on my 7 and experienced a nose over trying to land on an unfamiliar grass strip 1200 feet long on my last leg of phase 1 testing. My approach speed was way too high.. 80Kts.. floated and landed deep.. i should have gone round but because of the uphill landing i felt that i would make it, needless to say my nose went over the edge of the runway at approx. 5 knots and dropped about 20 feet thereby nosing over. i had the anti splat nose mod brace installed and after the event it became evident that the brace does work pretty well and that the original design is pretty strong. As others have said if one flies the nose wheel version of these amazing planes, keep the weight off the front as much as possible and fly them as it's design intends. After the repair work i went back to the said field and landed with a just under a half length remaining. I see that you had the Antisplat on your nose wheel. I also turned mine over by landing too flat and buckled the nose gear. I believe in my case, I would have been better off not having the antisplat brace. It would have "rolled" the nose gear back against the lower cowling and thus not dug into the soil and result in flipping the plane. In my case I broke the antisplat brace. I do not have pictures on this computer to show. It is a maybe this idea would not prevented the nose over, but I could only hope. The plane was rebuilt and is flying today. Moral of the story, keep the nose wheel off the ground for as long as possible. |
I?m still working on the firewall forward. If there was a way to mount the new engine mount and have my cowling line up perfectly I would probably bite the bullet and spend the money for the new mount. My mount is drilled and the cowling nearly done. I?m not sure how you would line everything up and back drill the new mount in the perfect position. If someone does it please take some video and share. Vans didn?t take any video of their install.
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I spoke to Van?s about this at OSH since I wasn?t sure how this would work either. In my case it was just curiosity since I haven?t drilled my firewall yet.
I think the way it works is there is a flat circular pad where the hole normally goes through. Normally it looks kinda like a washer has been welded on. For the predrilled firewalls the mount is supplied with a solid disk, no hole. The tube that the bolt goes through is over size so this allows some positional tolerance for the predrilled hole locations. |
Yeah the problem is lining up the mount and engine to the firewall so it is in perfect alignment with the already done cowling. Then back drilling through the firewall into the mount. Just from envisioning it I see how I could royally screw that up.
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For those that choose to do a retrofit, there is a complete set of instructions that will come with a retrofit mount/leg kit. They were developed while retrofitting the RV9A demonstrator.
Keep in mind that there is still the potential for engine alignment and spinner clearance issues. |
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