DE Landing Fear

[SmallCar]

Just out of curiosity, has anyone built the DE with a Cessna style spring landing gear in place of the traditional coil spring and linkage configuration?  It just seems that the Cessna style gear would be much simpler and probably not much heavier.

[okdonn]

I'm re-building a wrecked Woody's Pusher (look up N10RY). During the ground loop x2 phase of the crash, one of the spring steel gear legs (Wittman Gear) was bent and i ripped the mount point out of the fuselage. I'm replacing the landing gear with A-frame style and springs. They aren't covered yet, but so far they are under half the weight of the steel spring legs. as an aside, an engineer friend worked up replacing the steel legs with aluminum - the weight was the same (aluminum needs to be thicker for the spring rate)!
A neighbor has a Spezio 2-holer with Wittman gear that also ripped the mounts out during landing (don't know the details).
My advice is to follow the plans! You'll only bend the tubing of the A-frames at worst - an easy replacement rather than repairing the fuselage as well.

[SmallCar]

Sage advice!  After posting that question, I did some research on the Cessna spring gear system.  What you don't see is the MASSIVE structure that holds that spring in place.  No little pieces of tubing....Forgings!  I think you're absolutely correct that the gear that's designed for this thing is likely the best and lightest solution.  Thanks for the insight!

[Dan_]

The Volksplane has aluminum flat spring landing gear.  Those kind of changes make you a test pilot however...

BTW Steve Wittman had the patent on the flat steel and the round bar landing gear.  Cessna paid him royalties for both.  He had big flat aluminum gear legs on the O&O special.

[Theodore]

i like gear from 'backyard flyer'. i know DE more weight... but Resilience is aluminum