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-   -   New "A" Nose Gear - Should I Update? (https://vansairforce.net/community/showthread.php?t=173820)

Gabe 08-07-2019 01:42 AM

[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.

gmcjetpilot 08-08-2019 01:51 PM

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.


rvbuilder2002 08-08-2019 02:31 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by gmcjetpilot (Post 1365122)
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.

Many of the Cessna's, Piper's, and others, are tube engine mounts/frames as well with the nose gear attached to it.
Damaged firewalls are just an additional part of the failure mode when the nose gear leg rips off of the engine mount.

rhill 08-10-2019 01:57 PM

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

DaveO 08-10-2019 06:25 PM

Quote:Quote:
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.

dwranda 08-11-2019 10:04 AM

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.

rapid_ascent 08-11-2019 10:42 PM

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.

dwranda 08-12-2019 07:34 AM

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.

rvbuilder2002 08-12-2019 09:51 AM

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.

FireMedic_2009 08-12-2019 11:05 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by rightrudder (Post 1363043)
If it were me...

Take that $3900, purchase some extra 100LL and practice a bunch of nose-high landings at near stall speed. With proper technique, the standard nose gear will serve you just fine, and you'll have a lighter & simpler aircraft.

As for shimmy, make sure your wheels/tires are balanced, you have proper break-out force on the nose gear, and consider adding the wooden vibration dampers during the build.

I'm with you. Take the money and fly and/or use it for avionics. Unless you will be going to land at various grass fields that may not be in very good shape pocket the money. Will you get $4000 more for the plane because of the nose gear, probably not. And even if you did, didn't you pay $4000 more for the upgrade? So what did you gain? Now if you tell me I'm in the middle of the build and I can send in my unused old gear and get a credit back on it and it will only cost me $1000 or less, then ok it may be worth it. But $4000 more? Nope, not me. The old gear, oooops, "the classic gear" has served well. I'll use it for panel upgrades. If you only land on hard surface I don't see the need to upgrade the gear, even the need to use anti-splat


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