I was very impressed with this little plane as it appeared to be very well built by the previous owner and looked real presentable. In fact the workmanship was excellent, and a real credit to its previous owner/builder. However this aircraft had not flown for two years and I could see some initial issues, so I was prepared for some teething problems, and the price was right.
This aircraft was built as a nose wheel plane, as I was informed the owner-builder had no training or experience on tail draggers.
Bushcaddy at Cabolture, just after purchase. (Click on the photos to get a larger view)
The original dash panel.
This particular aircraft was the first in the world to be fitted with the Jabiru engine, and to the best of my knowledge, the only aircraft actually flying with the Jabiru engine at the time of writing. There were issues here. more later.
The trike undercarriage. Version three.This aircraft had broken two sets of nose wheels in only 40 hours of flying. This was the third variant. The first was the original factory nose wheel which was just not up to the harsh Australian grass airstrips. The second locally sourced "lightwing" model also failed, and the third version, another "Lightwing" system was fitted with double bracing. See photo above.
The nose wheel was direct coupled to the pedals to give front wheel steering.
Problem: The brake cylinders were fastened to the floor pan, and not the pedals themselves. In normal tail wheel configuration, this would not be a problem, however because there was a direct linkage to the nose wheel, the opposite brake would come on every time the front wheel was turned.
This was ok when going forward, as you would get nose wheel steering and differential braking in the one movement, however it made it impossible to push the aircraft backwards. The only way to go backwards was to go to the tail and pull it down, lifting the nose wheel off the ground and pull the aircraft backwards.
The fix was relatively simple and was done later at the new home airfield at Boonah. This involved unbolting the brake cylinders from the floor pan and welding support brackets to the brake pedals themselves.
The original nose wheel. This was just not up to Australian bush strips, or for that matter, any bush airstrip, (in my opinion), and soon broke, causing a prop strike.
Nose Wheel, version three installed by the previous owner-builder. This is a modified "Lightwing" nose wheel assembly. I soon found out that this was also not satisfactory.
The problem I found here was constant flexing of the support brackets and even the firewall itself on the first test flights, and Cabolture has a good grass airstrip. On checking the set up for "flex" I found there was NONE in the system itself. All the flex was in the support brackets and the firewall. If I kept going with this set up there would soon be a third nose wheel failure. But this time I would be the pilot and I would be footing the repair bill.
The system used a 1 inch diameter cylinder of polyurethane. This had no flex at all. In fact I put the slug in a vice and I could not compress the slug one bit, not even 1 mm. No wonder "Lightwing " nose wheel aircraft had a reputation for braking nose wheels. You might as well have installed a solid steel bar for flex. The guy who designed this set up could not have checked his work.
The original "non compressible" polyurethane slug.The fix was easy. I cut out a number of separate sponge rubber 15 mm deep slugs, and inserted these instead of the solid single polyurethane slug. I now had about 30 to 40 mm of flex instead of the zero flex that I had previously. Nothing like the front wheel travel of a Savannah or 701, but sure better than before.
I replaced the hard red polyurethane slug with the soft spongy rubber discs shown above. If I could have found the right sized spring I would have tried that as well. The red polyurethane had absolutely no "give" . The soft rubber did have some spring.
