Building the nose gear assembly

TLDR

• Built the nose gear assembly

Details

I thought building the nose gear would be a simple task but it turns out to be anything but simple. I spent the last 2 full days battling with Vasconite control bushings (again!)

So the job is basically putting the front wheel fork to the engine mount.

Except that the connection has 3 bushings and they need to rotate freely. The bushings are seated in some stainless steel parts, many of which were welded from the factory. It appears the welding process is less precise than the punching process typically done on aluminum, so my kit had a fairly significant misalignment issue at the start.

Long bolts

The lower part of the tubes are held together by 4 half bushings and 4 metal plates, and secured by 2 long bolts.

The long bolts simply does not thread through even the first plate. I took off the tube, and only kept the bushing in place, then ran a reamer through the holes to provide a little bit clearance. Then I started to try a few different things in no particular order:

• Shaved off material from the bushing retainer
• Sanded the bushings
• Add grease

Through the adjustment I kept rotating the tube, and it eventually left some markings on the bushing so it’s easy to tell which part needed more shaving.

With that, the long bolt eventually was able to to go in with some pushing force. Then tube was still very stiff, so I kept doing the above.

Lower bushings

Because there are several parts on the lower bushings, and they all looked the same. I added some label to each of them so they would always go in the same exact order. I don’t want to swap the parts in different order because once the shaving started they are pretty much committed to fit that particular location.

Torquing

As the lower bushings became loose, I did the same with the top bushing. The top one was not nearly as bad as the bottom one.

The last step was torquing everything down.

I so got into the rhythm to torque 29 ft lb for AN3 bolts, that I didn’t realize the instruction actually says DON’T torque them to the fullest to prevent bending. And sure enough, when I initially torqued them to the normal value, nothing works. The whole assembly became so stiff I couldn’t even rotate with both hands.

Once I realized my mistake, I loosened the bolts a little to unbend the retaining plates. The assembly became more free to rotate.

In the end it’s not frictionless, but I can turn it with one hand. I used a scale to measure the force needed to turn it, I measured 10 lbs or so. I think I’ve seen someone got to 7 lbs on the facebook builder group. I will admit I can’t get it to reduce force any further. I will call it good for now.

Wheel is on

Finally, I attached the front wheel to the assembly.