Once the dust has cleared, these fairings will simply flox to the top surface of the wing!!! ALL of the carving, ALL of the sculpting, ALL of the glassing, and 98% of the finish work will be eliminated, and the weight will be reduced! The fairings to the wing are a part of the mold and provide the flox bonding surfaces. The finish work in even this area is going to be minimal.

NEW NOSE GEAR GEOMETRY
I discussed the nose gear linkage geometry in the previous issue of the newsletter, #16, but I am going to review some of that here.

Ever since the Seahawk was designed, there were problems with the nose gear. It wouldn’t go up, and then it wouldn’t go down. The fiberglass struts broke like soda straws and there was no spring suspension in them whatsoever which was probably a large part of the reason that the struts broke so much! I developed a new strut which has proven worthy of the task, and I also worked through a very involved process of developing a spring assembly to replace the old hard link on the bottom of the linkage. The new spring assembly is a dream and further solved the nose gear problems.

There was still something that kept driving me nuts. The nose gear just would not retract decidedly and completely into the nose gear well and it just kept bugging me. Finally one morning in the shower it hit me as to what was wrong. I went right to the airport (well---, I dressed first) and went to work.
A lot of people had tried to position the hydraulic cylinder at different angles to get the retraction to work better. I realized that the problem wasn’t with the hydraulic cylinder, but with the upper link. The NG 4 on the Glass Goose that connects to the NGB 2 bearing point. That link was too short and was limiting the aft travel of all the other parts!

When the nose gear is retracted, the hydraulic cylinder, the spring assembly link (NG 3), and the center of the trunnion all line up in almost a straight line. Not quite, but almost. In this position, when the hydraulic cylinder tries to push the nose gear out or down, it is pushing on an almost straight stack of centered links kind of like a string of railroad cars being pushed by an engine. This makes it hard for the linkages to break over and start to move. I found that if the air loads on the nose gear door were too great, the linkages would not break over, and the nose gear would not extend!

I reviewed the geometry further and realized that all the hydraulic cylinder needed was for the nose gear strut to move forward just a fraction of an inch and the forces of the cylinder would take over from there. I installed a bungee cord across the aft part of the nose gear box to assist the strut in making that initial fraction of an inch of movement and the problem was solved. I made the bungee cord a permanent part of the nose gear mechanism. It is simple, it is inexpensive and it is trouble free. Of course to high tech people, it is a stupid low tech bungee cord. To me, it means that I fly trouble free all over the country while others are fighting with problems just because they don’t want to use a bungee cord on their high tech airplane.

PLEASE! I want your plane in the air flying dependably as a good example for the Glass Goose program. Don’t waste time on something that already works really well. I have NO trouble with the nose gear. It doesn’t need fixing. It is fine. Thousands of people watched me take off and land and retract and extend the gear in the process over and over last month at Sun & Fun. Spend your time doing a really good job of installing it the way it is supposed to be and find something else in this world that really needs your help. The Glass Goose nose gear doesn’t.