Actually, once you get past the cost, Titanium makes for very nice landing
gear. I have a friend that replaced the bungee main gear on his homebuilt
plane with Titanium gear legs that he designed and built. They were
aerodynamically much cleaner than his bungee gear with braces and bungees.
Corrosion also isn't much of a player with titanium. However, it is difficult
to bend to shape, and difficult to cut or grind.
Some aircraft do have aluminum gear legs, so clearly it can be engineered to be
used as a spring. However, you have to be really careful about overloading
aluminum. Aluminum doesn't really display fatigue so much as it will simply
fail once it has reached it's fatigue limit.
Fiberglass and carbon fiber also make nice springs if you want to spend some
time laying up unidirectional cloth, although best results will be done using
vacuum bagging and prepreg materials.
Solid rods are also a tail spring option as found on the Sonex and RV series
aircraft. The RV series uses a 4130 tapered rod while Sonex uses a straight
Titanium rod.
There's a reason why the vast majority of taildraggers have steel leaf springs.
However, if you have a unique situation where you really need to reduce every
last ounce of material at the tail, then there are other viable options.
Probably the lightest, and lowest profile (nice for a KR) would be the Sonex
Titanium rod, which also is relatively inexpensive at $80. The Sonex
non-swiveling tailwheel would also be very light weight, although I would
recommend using the Aviation Products Inc full swivel tailwheel. They have
them in both hard rubber 4" and soft semi-pneumatic 6" with single or double
fork units to match any tail spring assembly mounted at almost any angle.
For my KR, I bought a simple single leaf spring from Aircraft Spruce. I found
that spring to be a bit too soft, so took one backing leaf from a Cessna 140
spring set, cold hammered it to match the shape of the main spring, then torch
heated it cherry red and quenched in used motor oil to harden it in it's new
shape. That configuration has served me well for 1200 hours now.
-Jeff Scott
Cherokee Village, AR
> Subject: Re: KR> Tail Wheel Springs (but aluminium)
>
> Forgetting about the $$ problem, how about titanium? Does that have
> steel-like springiness?
>
> Mike Taglieri
>
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