Scott Krueger writes:

<<425 sits on the nose gear which is at about 12* (I think?) rake, thus
applying some "pull apart force" on the link.  Also, upon gear retraction,
the nose is the last to come up because of gas spring pressure adding to the
pull required.  During flight, main links hold up their weight, nose holds up
its weight on a longer arm plus force of gas spring.  Am I overy cautious?>>

Ahh, no.  I forgot about those things.  The static load on the parked nose
gear does, in fact, apply a small tensile load.  I would not worry about
that.  Also, if you bang the nose gear on it's side while landing (and we all
will) then the side load should be absorbed by the blocks attaching it to the
engine mount, but there could concievably be some bending applied to the
postulated rod end bearing.  Still, I don't think that would hurt anything
since some relief is allowed for by the rotational freedom of the spherical
rod end bearing.  So I think we're okay there, too.  The gas strut attaches
at the "knee" of the drag link (as I recall -- the airplane is in the garage
and I'm at work pretending to be busy) so the gas strut loads don't go into
the rod end at all.

My brain is full today.  I don't want to dig into this when there's a
talented and energetic youngster (Tim Ong) chomping at the bit (I hope).  But
if Tim is too busy then I guess I can whip up something.  I'd find a steel
rod end bearing that had an equivalent bending strength to the drag link at
the point of connection.  Then I'd model the amputated drag link in our CAD
system here at work (if I can figure out how) and try to run the stress
analysis package (yuk) and see how it turns out.  Then go over to the local
machine shop and get a quote on several of these.

Not what I really wanted to do, but if nobody else picks up the ball I guess
I'll have to...

- Rob Wolf
Lazy Slob (at least today)