Trojan T28 Repair, Nose Gear Repair

From my last post you know that I have several repairs to complete on my Airfield/FMS Trojan T-28.  In this post I'll update you on how I repaired the nose gear strut.

The strut had a compound bend mostly back and to the side.  I have no idea how it bent this much without any damage to the plastic parts or the servo.

Any way, this is how it looked:

A big concern of mine was "how am I going to bend this back without breaking the thing?"  It really looks like any pressure on this thing is going to shatter any and all of that plastic.

My first thought was to use a bench vise and smash the thing straight again.  The big problem with that is that this method does not always come out completely straight and, worst of all, it most likely would leave lots of marks that would prevent free movement.

What else to do?  I thought about using a large pair of pliers or vice grips, but they tend to become unwieldy and would also most likely leave marks as well.

Needing some help, I browsed some forums for advice.  I did find one post that reported the same repair to their T-28 gear and they did use a vise, but only as a support to pry against.  They also mentioned that you could put a considerable amount of force on the plastic covered part without it breaking.  This sounded pretty good, but my vice isn't mounted down well enough to pry against (just sits on my bench).  So what next?

I was at work and thinking about where I might find something that I could insert the gear into that was sturdy and I could pry against.  This wasn't exactly what I was thinking of, but it's what I found.

I used my Excelite driver handle.  It worked great!  What I did was to hold the gear in my left hand and the Excelite screw driver handle in my right hand.  Then I used by thumbs to lever against the bent section.  Sorry but I did not get any photos or video of the process.  It did take some time as I took it slow, not wanting to over bend it or put too much force on the plastic.  I started with correcting one direction and got that straight and then worked on the other direction until it looked straight from both sides.

Soon, I had something that looked like this:

This was enough and it slipped right back into the trunnion of the gear servo without any issues.

After this I realized that I could have used any sort of pipe or tubing that was sturdy and long enough.  This sure seemed a lot better than using a couple of pliers.

So, with this resolved, I just had to take the landing gear servo apart and put it all back together with the strut back in place.

One down and how many to go?

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