REFLECTOR: Nose wheel shimmy drag

Al Gietzen ALVentures at cox.net
Fri Jul 10 12:12:57 CDT 2009


Just to confirm what some others already know – 

I accepted Jeff’s generous offer of a nylon washer for the nose gear pivot.
He sent me a black, apparently quite hard form of nylon, about .1” thick.
After sanding on flat surface with 600 and 1000 grit to remove machining
marks, I installed it yesterday.  I simply put a film of grease on it, and
placed between top of the fork and the existing composition washer. I
removed one Belleville so the lock nut still does its job.

 

I set the drag to 12# measured at the outer diameter of the tire (this force
has worked fine for my plane).  The big difference is that the breakaway
force (a.k.a; sticktion) is pretty much negligible.  The movement starts
with about 12 ½ #, and continues at 12.  With just the composition washer I
typically found the breakaway force to be maybe 3 – 4 # more than that
required to maintain movement.

 

This doesn’t solve the issue of difficult steering at low taxi speeds, but
should be an improvement. I’ll let you know how it goes after used for
awhile; but it seems that Velocity could certainly consider some type of
nylon in place of the composition washer.  Jeff probably has the specs for
the nylon he used.

 

Al

 

 

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