Nose gear safety stick, remove nose wheel | 2.17.2021

I've been putting this one off for a while for some reason. Finally got around to working on the nose gear safety stick. In short: this is a "stick" that goes through the keel so that if you were to use the gravity drop gear fail-safe, you can ensure the the nose gear is locked and will stay over-center. Stick the "stick" in one side, pry up on the gear linkage (if not all the way up), then slide it over through the other side to hold the gear up over center.

Started by locating the hole. I actually used a flashlight for this. Held the small round flashlight in the inside of the keel and then marked the center of the light. Adjusted for thickness of the flashlight vs the material and drilled a hole slightly above this point.

Once the hole was drilled, I filed it to fit the 3/4" 4130 steel tubing that I'm using for this. The book calls for a 1" wooden dowel, but after talking with Scott Swing, a piece of steel tubing is often used in place of this. The only concern is accidental retraction with the stick in -- you can wreck stuff. Mental note made to not leave this thing in there... ever.

Here's the scrap piece of tubing I used to mock this up. Fresh new tubing on order.

After that was done, I pulled off the nose wheel tire+ tube to eventually replace. From what I can tell, the nose tire is likely 13+ years old. Not a risk I want to take at 80 knots. Once getting the tire off the rim, I noticed quite a bit of surface corrosion on the rim itself. I could have likely cleaned this up with a wire wheel, but I was already taking some other parts to a friend's shop to get sandblasted, so I figured I'd blast and paint this as well.

Here's the corrosion

That's it for now!
- Jeff