Nose wheel pants missing from many C182s?

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MountainDude

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MountainDude
My 1976 C182 did not come with the nose wheel pant (previous owner did not answer why).
I see many other C182s without a nose wheel pant (but have the mains).
Any reason why this is the case?
 
Probably damaged at some point in the past and so expensive to replace they just didn’t bother. Threw it out rather than kept it to show the next owner how they damaged it. Ha.
 
MountainDude said:
My 1976 C182 did not come with the nose wheel pant (previous owner did not answer why).
I see many other C182s without a nose wheel pant (but have the mains).
Any reason why this is the case?
Click to expand...
Damage is probably one reason.
We used to take our wheel pants off our 172 in the winter. The mains can be removed with pretty quick without removing the wheels. The nose wheel has to be removed to get the wheel pant off and is a bit more involved. I would guess more than a few people just decided to leave nose pant off.
 
If it is indeed 182 specific, I’m guessing it has to do with their supposed tendency to bang up nose gears and firewalls. So if the firewall has been repaired, maybe they tossed the broken nose pant out.
 
In 1981 Cessna evaluated a proposed 182 variant with retractable nosegear but fixed mains, á là the German MBB Bo.209. The idea was rejected for a number of reasons, aesthetic and operational, but on the ground it would have looked like a stiff-leg 182 with the nose pant missing. :confused:
 
The first time I was up in the club 182H I’m now in the nose wheel pant broke off on rollout after landing.
Guy I was with didn’t really hammer the landing down. On TO there was a nose wheel shimmy -a nagging problem for past two years- he said just had to keep pressure off the nose. On landing shimmy for real bad and I heard this Big Bang. We get out after parking and take a look and the pant was missing -was out on runway in pieces. We replaced it.
 
the wheel fairings are listed as a set, they are not listed as each. so it is all or none
 
Maybe it's a story similar to a Cherokee 140. Namely, to get the nosewheel pant off of a Cherokee you have to take the wheel off, which means you have to jack the nose up (or pull the tail down). Much more rigamarole than removing the pants for the mains--maybe somebody got tired of doing it.

Tim
 
They just like to look Ghetto riding with the front missing!
Probably to lazy to take the other two off.
 
Main wheel pants without a nose wheel pant is just WRONG.

first it looks dumb.

but more importantly,

the nose wheel pant is the most important one because it's in the prop wash.

Ping @meglin

he can probably make one for you at a fraction of the cost of other suppliers.
 
benyflyguy said:
The first time I was up in the club 182H I’m now in the nose wheel pant broke off on rollout after landing.
Guy I was with didn’t really hammer the landing down. On TO there was a nose wheel shimmy -a nagging problem for past two years- he said just had to keep pressure off the nose. On landing shimmy for real bad and I heard this Big Bang. We get out after parking and take a look and the pant was missing -was out on runway in pieces. We replaced it.
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That's the biggest reason so many are missing. Nosewheel shimmy shakes them apart.
 
Ours got damaged :rolleyes: and it was very expensive to replace, I had my body shop fix it, good as new!
 
Dan Thomas said:
That's the biggest reason so many are missing. Nosewheel shimmy shakes them apart.
Click to expand...
I thought it was coming off the other day. Got a shimmy between ~40-60mph. Goes away at higher speed. Weird. Just “started” we aired up the tire after it was low with colder temps and added some pressure to the strut. I stay “started” as we have spent a seemingly small fortune investigating nosewheel shimmy.
 
benyflyguy said:
I thought it was coming off the other day. Got a shimmy between ~40-60mph. Goes away at higher speed. Weird. Just “started” we aired up the tire after it was low with colder temps and added some pressure to the strut. I stay “started” as we have spent a seemingly small fortune investigating nosewheel shimmy.
Click to expand...
The only cure for nosewheel shimmy is to get the wheel/tire assembly dynamically balanced. Not a static balance, which is all most aircraft wheels ever get. Automobile wheels have been dynamically balanced for 50 or more years now. I can remember when the steering wheel shook all the time in cruise before dynamic balancing became common.

Take the wheel assembly to a motorcycle shop that has a dynamic balancer for smaller wheels.

I used to balance all the nosewheels at the flight school and shimmy was never an issue. I used an old automotive dynamic balancer and converted it to the smaller wheels.
 
Cessna Pilot’s Assn has good (and correct) info on nosewheel shimmy.

Often it is the balance. And that is a very easy fix.

When it’s not, every component should be checked for tolerances, sloppiness, looseness, inappropriate strut inflation, all of it... by the book. Often people replace the shimmy dampener and think that’s a fix because it hides it for a while, when really a component is way out of tolerance, bent, broken, whatever.

Also, has to be said... stop landing on the nosewheel. LOL. No seriously. Hold it off. :) If it’s touching down almost immediately after the mains, wrong speed or the yoke isn’t touching your gut at the end of the landing. :) :) :)

With practice you can fly it down before it plops down. That engine is heavy up there... help it out with more elevator. All of the elevator. :) :) :)
 
N747JB said:
Ours got damaged :rolleyes: and it was very expensive to replace, I had my body shop fix it, good as new!
Click to expand...

That's the reason for it missing on our Archer. A rogue Power Tow did the damage. A little fiberglass work in the hangar and its as good as new but we're swapping the high time engine in Feb so have not bothered to put it back on until then since it will come off to do the annual at the same time.
 
All three wheel fairings on my C206 are in like-new condition and will probably stay that way until if and when a new owner decides to put them back on. Here in the Northeast it's just not worth dealing with snow and ice in them, nor it's it worth the extra effort to check tire pressures. Their exposure to damage is low while they are safely stored in the hangar.

Besides, I prefer that it look like the weightlifter it is rather than the ballerina it isn't. :)
 
denverpilot said:
Cessna Pilot’s Assn has good (and correct) info on nosewheel shimmy.

Often it is the balance. And that is a very easy fix.

When it’s not, every component should be checked for tolerances, sloppiness, looseness, inappropriate strut inflation, all of it... by the book. Often people replace the shimmy dampener and think that’s a fix because it hides it for a while, when really a component is way out of tolerance, bent, broken, whatever.

Also, has to be said... stop landing on the nosewheel. LOL. No seriously. Hold it off. :) If it’s touching down almost immediately after the mains, wrong speed or the yoke isn’t touching your gut at the end of the landing. :) :) :)

With practice you can fly it down before it plops down. That engine is heavy up there... help it out with more elevator. All of the elevator. :) :) :)
Click to expand...
Cessna Pilot's Association's recommendation is a static balance, not a dynamic balance. There's a huge difference between the two. The only "aircraft" wheel balancers I've ever found are Goodyear's and McFarlane's and they're both static balancers.

If we static-balanced our car tires, the steering wheel would shake all the time on the highway and the steering components would wear out.

You're right on the shimmy damper and scissors and stuff. They won;t last long if the shimmy isn't stopped. They only mask it. When I balanced the nosewheels properly, those components lasted forever because they had little to do.
 
Dan Thomas said:
Cessna Pilot's Association's recommendation is a static balance, not a dynamic balance.
Click to expand...

Something must have changed. When John was alive and teaching 182 systems classes he discussed dynamic balancing and how to find it... back then usually motorcycle shops since airport mechanics were decades behind the times and didn’t have the equipment for the most part. Many still don’t.
 
MountainDude said:
My 1976 C182 did not come with the nose wheel pant (previous owner did not answer why).
I see many other C182s without a nose wheel pant (but have the mains).
Any reason why this is the case?
Click to expand...


When I was learning to fly in early 2000s in Yankton SD the FBO there ran EVERYTHING without the nose wheel pants, because their favorite tug to shuffle airplanes was a LOT easier to use that way. Yes they held 135 certificates and had FAA visits often, no one cared about it.

They moved a ton of airplanes around every week with one of these.

upload_2019-12-23_10-16-5.png
 
denverpilot said:
Something must have changed. When John was alive and teaching 182 systems classes he discussed dynamic balancing and how to find it... back then usually motorcycle shops since airport mechanics were decades behind the times and didn’t have the equipment for the most part. Many still don’t.
Click to expand...
Way back in 2015 I posted this:

Shimmy's root cause is dynamic imbalance. Period. Loose parts are a result of shimmy, not a cause. Loose wheel bearings will aggravate shimmy but they're not the root cause. Statically balancing the wheel (which is, at most, all most light aircraft wheels get) will not eliminate a dynamic balance. Landing on the nosewheel puts stresses on a whole lot of stuff and does a lot more than loosen linkages and cause shimmy.

A few posts back I posted a link explaining the difference between static and dynamic imbalance. Not many appear to have read it. The front wheels of automobiles suffer exactly the same issues as aircraft nosewheels, and dynamic imbalance there can be felt in the steering wheel. It, too, loosens up steering linkages and suspension parts and ruins tires. Many years ago when I was a kid working in a service station, we used a static tire balancer that got rid of the vertical shake but did nothing for shimmy; one sometimes just got lucky. And in cars, the sheer weight and strength of the front end stuff masked the worst of it anyway. Today, though, nobody will tolerate a shaky ride in their vehicles becasue we've become accustomed to having our wheels dynamically balanced to really tight tolerances so that they run smoothly. But we tolerate nosewheel shimmy because "that's what Cessnas do." Baloney. They don't have to do it, and just tightening up all the linkages and wheel bearings is only masking the real problem: the imbalanced wheel.

This wheel could be statically balanced, but will shimmy mightily.

wheel-balancer-dynamicimbalance.jpg


A quote:
DYNAMIC IMBALANCE
When a tire has more weight on the inside or outside of its tread, it has a dynamic imbalance. Dynamic imbalance is only noticeable when the tire and wheel is spinning. The tire will have a tendency to shimmy from side to side (left and right) which also results in faster tire wear. When the tire is spinning the heavy spot will tend to seek the centerline of the tire. This is why the tire shimmies from side to side. When the heavy spot is in front, it pushes the wheel to one side. After the tire rotates one half revolution, the heavy spot causes the wheel to try to turn in the opposite direction. However, most tires have imbalances on both sides of the tire, requiring counterbalancing weights to be placed on both sides of the wheel.

From http://www.derekweaver.com/learn/wheel-balancer/

And I continued:

When a pilot lifts the nosewheel when it shimmies, he's engaging the centering cam on the torque links that freeze the nosewheel straight ahead, stopping the shimmy. If he brakes hard, the airplane nosedives and puts lots of weight on the nose tire, squashing it and making its footprint so large that it does not change direction easily, thus restricting the shimmy. Both techniques work but shouldn't be necessary.

If you really want to know what causes nosewheel shimmy, watch this video. If you want to keep on spending money fooling with shimmy dampers and torque links and all that, don't bother. I spent enough years fooling with dampers and stuff and finally realized what the problem was. Once I started doing dynamic balances, usually without bothering at all with the damper and links or bearings or anything else, the shimmy disappeared. The aircraft nosewheel will shimmy really badly at whatever speed (wheel RPM) the wheel's imbalance resonates at. It will also be worse than in a car because the nosegear leg is so flexible compared to a car's suspension.


I converted an old mechanical dynamic balancer to do nosewheels. When I changed jobs I didn't have it anymore, so I built my own:
Balancer.jpg

You MUST spin the wheel to find where the dynamic imbalance is. A static balancer cannot find it.

I did a lot of tailwheels by hand, holding the axle and letting a wire wheel on a bench grinder spin the wheel up a bit. Experimenting with weights temporarily held in place with small cubes of stiff foam rubber, you can find where the weights, and how much weight, needs to be. I did nosewheels like that, too, before the balancers. One has to take the bearings out and clean al the grease off them so the wheel will rotate freely, and regrease them after the balance is done.

I've seen guys balance a nosewheel in a static rig and not even take the bearings and seals out. They don't get it centered, since the centering cones will sit in the seal washers but the washers will shift in the wheel bore, and they end up with a really badly imbalanced wheel.
 
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The other thing to check is tire shape. You'd be surprised how many tires have bulges or flat spots. Those can really mess things up.

Cold temperatures (and less flexible rubber) don't help either.
 
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kyleb said:
The other thing to check is tire shape. You'd be surprised how many tires have bulges or flat spots. Those can really mess things up.

Cold temperatures (and less flexible rubber) don't help shimmy.
Click to expand...

Odd tire shapes are often from shimmy or tramp wearing the tire all goofy. Sometimes it's because the bearings haven't been preloaded at all and the tire rotates after liftoff and stops with its heavy side at the bottom, which is where it will always touch down. Sometimes it's the pilot braking too hard and skidding the tire.

And sometimes it's just "aircraft quality" at work. I've found brand-new tires 1/8" out-of-round. Even the cheapest car tire is better than that.
 
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