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Balancing wheel pants?

1

1Oldguy

Active Member
Can not remember when (several years ago) I read an artical about balacing wheel pants on Whitman style landing gears.:confused: This helped take out the shimmy they tend to have at some point in the landing rollout. This was done along with the wooden stifferns on the gear legs. Anybody tried this or know anythings about this idea. Do not want to add any more wieght that really does nothing but add weight. The process was to add lead shot into the noise of the pant to balance the wheel pant over the center of the tire.
 
I balanced mine before the first flight. If I had it to do over again, I'd wait until after the first flight, and find out if my aircraft was subject to shimmy. If it was, then I'd tape on external weights and see if that cured the problem.

What I've found is that my plane is subject to shimmy with the balanced pants. However, the shimmy seems to be (largely) tied to out of round and/or out of balance tires.
 
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Vote for balance

I balanced my main pants after 1000 hours. Results were good. It took about 14 oz per pant. I have a belly cam in front of the tail tie down, so I can easily observe the results via video after the flight. Search "Lakeland South X49 2010" on youtube. Shows wheels on the grass in the 1st 10 seconds of the video. You can see the fast action. Any imbalance with that action will be multiplied and affect the life of some of those parts. When the pants are balanced less effort in balancing the tires is needed to get good results. On most grass and some pavement you can get a lot of shaking even when tires are perfect. IMHO. I got the lead free at the tire shop from old wheel weights.
 
Balance job

Thanks for the information and good to know I didn't dream this up:rolleyes:. Think I'll waite till after a few flights to see what happens. Good idea Kyle. Just waiting for the "feds" to show up and give me the green light.
 
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