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Joe,
What Dave said. I did my first few flights with stock
gear. Didn’t find the gear "too springy" but had intermittent problems with
severe shimmy on rollout. I added hardwood stiffeners to the trailing edges of
the gear legs. Stiffeners were bonded to the legs with epoxy after curing I
wrapped the legs with 3" wide glass tape (spiral wrapped) saturated with
epoxy. Gear is now noticeably stiffer and no more shimmy. My previous airplane,
an RV-6A, didn’t have stiffeners and only occasionally had shimmy issues. In a
lot of RVs the shimmy can be cured simply by running low air pressure in the
tires.
Have your buddy go to the RV-list at www.matronics.com and use the search engine
to look at landing gear shimmy.
Mike Wills
Sent: Tuesday, June 22, 2010 4:01 PM
Subject: [FlyRotary] Re: RV question
Joe,
your friend should talk to some RV guys. We are everywhere.
Lots of info about gear legs in some of the archives of the rv matronics list,
the rv forum, and on vans website.
most 4 and 6 gear legs are wrapped with wood and fiberglass (instructions
in the plans), but it is not for springiness, but shimmy while
taxiing. The 4/6 gear legs are a little springy, but not
excess. If he really thinks it was excessive, there could be something
wrong with some part of the system (like the engine mount). Otherwise, it
could be unfamiliarity with the aircraft... not difficult, but
significantly different from a c172.
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