Nose gear repair experience

[PT20J]

Atlantic Aviation in San Jose, CA oversteered my nose gear when parking my 1994 M20J and broke off one of the steering stops. They wouldn't admit to it, and I couldn't prove it (next time, I'll take photos before it gets moved), so I filed a claim with USAIG and they are taking care of it.

But I still had to get it fixed. I called Dan at LASAR and learned that LASAR isn't currently rebuilding nose gears because it no longer has approval from the FAA after moving to Oregon. I next called Frank Crawford at Mooney and found out that Mooney had a gear leg in stock. Greg Lehman at Advanced Aircraft in Troutdale, OR ordered it for me and had it shipped to my address and scheduled a date to install it. The reason I had it shipped to me is that it comes primed and mine is painted red, so I needed to have it painted. I had some paint that I had matched awhile back and Mike Payne at the Port Townsend Aero Museum agreed to paint it for me in his paint booth.

Alas, the landing gear leg had a pinhole defect in one of the welds and I had to RMA it back to Mooney. Mooney was currently building a lot of 10 legs which the manufacturing engineer expedited so that I could get one in time to get it painted and keep my date with Advanced. 

Yesterday, I flew it to Advanced and Greg and his team installed it. The folks at Mooney were really great at helping me get the part, and I can't recommend Greg and his team at Advanced Aircraft highly enough. USAIG has also been very easy to deal with, and is even picking up cost of the gas for my flight to the shop and back.

Skip

[ilovecornfields]

Greg is great. Real asset to the Mooney community.

[Fly Boomer]

2 hours ago, PT20J said:

Atlantic Aviation in San Jose, CA oversteered my nose gear when parking my 1994 M20J and broke off one of the steering stops. They wouldn't admit to it, and I couldn't prove it (next time, I'll take photos before it gets moved), so I filed a claim with USAIG and they are taking care of it.

But I still had to get it fixed. I called Dan at LASAR and learned that LASAR isn't currently rebuilding nose gears because it no longer has approval from the FAA after moving to Oregon. I next called Frank Crawford at Mooney and found out that Mooney had a gear leg in stock. Greg Lehaman at Advanced Aircraft in Troutdale, OR ordered it for me and had it shipped to my address and scheduled a date to install it. The reason I had it shipped to me is that it comes primed and mine is painted red, so I needed to have it painted. I had some paint that I had matched a while back and Mike Payne at the Port Townsend Aero Museum agreed to paint it for me in his paint booth.

Alas, the landing gear leg had a pinhole defect in one of the welds and I had to RMA it back to Mooney. Mooney was currently building a lot of 10 legs which the manufacturing engineer expedited so that I could get one in time to get it painted and keep my date with Advanced. 

Yesterday, I flew it to Advanced and Greg and his team installed it. The folks at Mooney were really great at helping me get the part, and I can't recommend Greg and his team at Advanced Aircraft highly enough. USAIG has also been very easy to deal with, and is even picking up cost of the gas for my flight to the shop and back.

Skip

Sorry to hear about the damage.  Happy to hear that the stars aligned for repair.  There doesn't seem to be any way to keep FBO people from damaging our airplanes.

[PT20J]

7 minutes ago, Fly Boomer said:

There doesn't seem to be any way to keep FBO people from damaging our airplanes.

I think that's correct. It's really a bad design. First, the turn angle is really limited compared to other airplanes: 11 deg left and 13 deg right. Second, the actual stops are in the tail for the rudder and there is a lot of play in the system that can cause the nose wheel to be turned easily past where the stops make contact. On later models, Mooney tried to improve this by adding secondary stops to the nose gear leg itself, but these are pretty flimsy. 

After talking to the manufacturing engineer, I'm actually surprised that Mooney only charges around $2500 for this part. It's hand built from a bunch of short tubes and flat pieces that have to be fitted and then held together with a lot of welds in close quarters. It must take hours make one. Then Mooney sends it out for heat treating (Mooney doesn't have an oven) and then they have to paint it. Apparently it is not uncommon to find one or more pinholes in all those welds and they only show up after painting when the oil residue leaks out and stains the paint. It happens often enough that they have developed a rework process. 

Skip

[A64Pilot]

IF oil can come out, that’s a good sign.

It means first that it been filled and drained most likely with linseed oil and secondly that it’s sealed, so it will never rust from the inside out, and that’s important because it’s very difficult to inspect the inside of a tube. Old school way was with an ice pick, more recently you can use an ultrasonic thickness gauge.

The entire Thrush fuselage is done this way, when your talking about an entire fuselage there will of course be pin holes, we found them by pressurizing it with shop air and using a squirt bottle with soapy water, only after we fixed all the pin holes we filled the fuselage with hot boiled linseed oil and drained it overnight.

Also the linseed oil is excellent for finding cracks, if it leaks out of a crack it will look like dried varnish and you will see that.

The gear is like it is I’m sure because it could be hand built, things like Oleo struts like a Beech, Piper etc take lots of money in machining and casting to make and if your a smallish company that’s not in the budget.

Makes me wonder how or where Maule got their struts, because nobody’s smaller than Maule.

Yeah, it’s a bad design, but it is, what it is.

My 81J has stops on the gear itself, bolts. That’s not normal?

[PT20J]

1 hour ago, A64Pilot said:

My 81J has stops on the gear itself, bolts. That’s not normal?

Mooney added the stops somewhere early in the M20J production. My 78 didn’t have them. LASAR has an STC to add the stops as part of its rebuild, if they ever start doing that again. Mooney puts them on any new part they make.

[PT20J]

As Don Maxwell put it, the killer combination is an 8’ towbar, a 2000 lb tug, and a 19 year-old kid.

[EricJ]

26 minutes ago, PT20J said:

Mooney added the stops somewhere early in the M20J production. My 78 didn’t have them. LASAR has an STC to add the stops as part of its rebuild, if they ever start doing that again. Mooney puts them on any new part they make.

So your new one has them and your old one didn't?

Mine had gotten a new Lasar nosegear 40 hours before I bought it, so it's been there since I've had it.   That said, it doesn't get handled by anybody else very often, but so far so good with mine.

[Bolter]

23 minutes ago, PT20J said:

As Don Maxwell put it, the killer combination is an 8’ towbar, a 2000 lb tug, and a 19 year-old kid.

The FBO as Stinson Field (KSSF, San Antonio) got my usual warning about towing Mooney's, and they showed me a tow bar that had a flexible joint in it that prevented  them overloading the nose gear.  Claimed they got it from the factory at some point.  I have not seen one anywhere else.   

-dan 

[MooneyMitch]

8 hours ago, PT20J said:

Yesterday, I flew it to Advanced and Greg and his team installed it. The folks at Mooney were really great at helping me get the part, and I can't recommend Greg and his team at Advanced Aircraft highly enough.

A complete professional providing quality, honest, efficient service at competitive rates.  

[GeeBee]

Glad it all worked out Skip. I've been thinking about buying a nose gear and just putting it on the shelf. With new ones coming out, they may be what I want to do.

I almost want to make FBO's "sign for the airplane". That is, they look at it and sign no damage, so if they damage it, it is on them.

 

[PT20J]

43 minutes ago, EricJ said:

So your new one has them and your old one didn't?

Mine had gotten a new Lasar nosegear 40 hours before I bought it, so it's been there since I've had it.   That said, it doesn't get handled by anybody else very often, but so far so good with mine.

I owned a 78 J 30 years ago that didn't have the stops. My 94 J that I own not has always had them.

[kortopates]

I owned a 78 J 30 years ago that didn't have the stops. My 94 J that I own not has always had them.

it’s always been my understanding that Paul Lowen first designed the stops to protect the truss and then Mooney adopted Paul’s improvement.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[201Steve]

9 hours ago, PT20J said:

oversteered my nose gear when parking my 1994 M20J and broke off one of the steering stops.

You have pics?

[PT20J]

37 minutes ago, 201Steve said:

You have pics?

[Ragsf15e]

12 minutes ago, PT20J said:

Ouch.

did anything happen to the stops in the tail?  And what does the tail look like when those are the only stops?!

I basically don’t ever let an fbo tow my airplane.  I put a sign (1/2” pvc is good) through the nose gear hollow truss that says don’t tow, call owner.  Most places have been ok with me just pushing it where they want me to tie it down.

[PT20J]

7 minutes ago, Ragsf15e said:

Ouch.

did anything happen to the stops in the tail?  And what does the tail look like when those are the only stops?!

I basically don’t ever let an fbo tow my airplane.  I put a sign (1/2” pvc is good) through the nose gear hollow truss that says don’t tow, call owner.  Most places have been ok with me just pushing it where they want me to tie it down.

I did check the rudder stops and they were OK. The rudder tube is to the left of the picture. The fixed stop looks a little bent, but it has always been that way and the Service and Maintenance Manual allows bending it to adjust the rudder deflection. The fixed stop is so much heavier metal than the stops clamped on the push-pull tube that I don't think it could be bent by the push-pull tube and I would expect damage to be to the tube or stops clamped to the tube. The maximum rudder deflection measured per spec each way. 

 

[PhateX1337]

I’ll add another amazing review for Greg - glad he took care of you. He was hugely helpful to me getting me in for a prebuy last summer and made some really great observations and suggestions. 

[Vance Harral]

56 minutes ago, PT20J said:

The fixed stop looks a little bent, but it has always been that way and the Service and Maintenance Manual allows bending it to adjust the rudder deflection.

Those stops on our 1976 M20F are a little bent, too.  Bothered me the first time I saw it, but I've seen a few other samples since, and it seems this bent look is normal.

[PT20J]

2 minutes ago, Vance Harral said:

Those stops on our 1976 M20F are a little bent, too.  Bothered me the first time I saw it, but I've seen a few other samples since, and it seems this bent look is normal.

I bet it's in the manual because that's probably the way the factory adjusts them. They probably set the stops on the tube to some fixed location and bend the fixed stop to take up any variations in the airframe. My airplane only has 1600 hours on it and I'm pretty sure from the logs that this has never been messed with.

[Ragsf15e]

17 hours ago, PT20J said:

I’m guessing these are the stops?  It hits the head of the bolt before the tubes hit?  
So if yours completely broke it dropped off on the ramp and the fbo person was likely aware…

[Brent]

On 5/25/2023 at 12:35 PM, PT20J said:

I think that's correct. It's really a bad design. First, the turn angle is really limited compared to other airplanes: 11 deg left and 13 deg right. Second, the actual stops are in the tail for the rudder and there is a lot of play in the system that can cause the nose wheel to be turned easily past where the stops make contact. On later models, Mooney tried to improve this by adding secondary stops to the nose gear leg itself, but these are pretty flimsy. 

After talking to the manufacturing engineer, I'm actually surprised that Mooney only charges around $2500 for this part. It's hand built from a bunch of short tubes and flat pieces that have to be fitted and then held together with a lot of welds in close quarters. It must take hours make one. Then Mooney sends it out for heat treating (Mooney doesn't have an oven) and then they have to paint it. Apparently it is not uncommon to find one or more pinholes in all those welds and they only show up after painting when the oil residue leaks out and stains the paint. It happens often enough that they have developed a rework process. 

Skip

Guessing they weld everything together with an assembly fixture, so the labor might not be horrible. But I would have thought the pinhole thing would be mitigated with a requirement for a dye penetrant inspection on the welds.