Black Diamonds Aero

[Antoine]

Folks I have just obtained a used nose landing gear leg.

I would like, as a test project, to do the following:

- Reverse engineer it into a CAD program.
- Design an alternative made of composites
- Build 2 prototypes and stress test one until destruction

The new NLG leg would be part of a coherent nose landing gear redesign as follows:

- fairing and leg integrated in one continuous airfoil shaped design. Something that is aerodynamically similar to the fairing of the DA40NG, only it's not a fairing...
- LED landing and taxi light included
- fix to the corked NLG issue
- design landing load: 1280 Kg MTOW (DA40 NG / future DA40)

The current part weighs 5.75 Kg.

The objective would be to shave 2 Kg off that while reducing the frontal area of the leg by 33% and the overall drag of the nose gear assembly by... a lot.
Including the landing and taxi lights will allow for the elimination of the wing based lights, with a subsequent gain in weight and aerodynamics.

No plans to certifiy this at this point. It is merely an experiment. If it proves successful, a redesign of the MLG will follow. Certification will only become a possibility once we have everything ready to certify a MTOW increase and that may be after several such subprojects are successfully closed. I believe that only the MTOW increase can make the certification effort sustainable.

I am looking for people who have contacts to universities who could take over the different subprojects. Please PM if you can help.

[Bret]

Antoine, I have full testing and manufacturing capabilites at our facility here in North Carolina USA We can create a solid model of the gear and do FEA modeling then prototypes and testing. Let me know if you need help

[Antoine]

Thanks for your offer, Bret

You and I have in the past discussed this topic and I understood that you were progressing the redesign of the complete landing gear on your own, using your plane as a "donor" .

Have you made progress? How would this one fit into your own initiative?

Regarding this specific project, if it can be done by your company as opposed to dispersing the effort over several university subprojects, I'm all for it.

My concern is: If a "real" company is doing the project, I would not want to hand over responsibility and see it stall due to lack of priority versus revenue generating projects. Are you in a position to allocate some R&D time to it in the not too distant future?

(I suggest we switch to PM as this discussion is unlikely to be of interest to other readers...)