Nose gear cylinder rebuild, attempted re-assemble | 10.3.2020 - 10.5.2020

Rebuilt the cylinder with new parts from Velocity. Pretty standard hydraulic cylinder rebuild, some parts had changed from what I had; namely, this kit included a T seal, rather than an O-ring with support. I did have to use the 90 degree snap ring plier ends; strait ends didn't work.

 

Had to buy snap ring pliers for this one task.

Re-installed the cylinder and re-connected hydraulic lines without any real issues. At this point, I removed the nose gear, removed the old white nose gear strut, and installed the stronger brown one as the factory has instructed. Attempted to hand cycle the nose gear and it wouldn't go over-center to lock in place. Took a second to look at the two struts that I had and noticed that the brown strut was longer by about a quarter inch. This caused the linkage to be too long overall, and not able to lock over-center.

At this point, I called Chad, who told me that I could trim the captivator somewhat to give it more room to be able to lock in place, so I trimmed the captivator.

Filing away.

 

This would have gone great, except that I trimmed it too much. Now the linkage wouldn't lock in place over-center. Guess I need a new captivator now. Called it a night on that defeat.

10.5.2020 - Since it was the weekend and I was waiting till Monday to order a new captivator, I thought about it some more and realized that I could take some 1/8" aluminum plate, cut it to size, drill some holes in it, and stick it behind the captivator as a spacer to take up the extra space that I had from filing the captivator too deep. So I did just that. Worked great, the gear locked over-center in the down position like it should, everything was hunky-dory. That was until I pushed the gear up into the nose with the cylinder attached and realized that due to the geometry changes from the longer strut, the gear no longer fully retracted when the cylinder ran out of travel. This was pretty disheartening. I don't have any pictures from this because I was too mad and just forgot. Called it a day there.

- Jeff