So more harebrained ideas (this is what happens when I do my usual week of overnight call in the hospital so my Christian colleagues can enjoy Christmas with their families (we jokingly refer to chrostmas overnights as 2 jews and a hindu - I did make sure to have Chinese food on Christmas Eve being an observant jew!) Anyway I had another cool idea as an extension to the last cool idea flight sim project:
So one of the features that Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 added was the ability to get out of the plane and do a “walk around” which is where the pilot checks a bunch of things on the plane (like no loose bolts, all the pins/covers are removed which have those remove before flying streamers) and verifies fuel etc. Now on the airliners you aren’t verifying fuel like on a Cessna where you can simply look into the tank with a stepstool, you’d need a cherry picker, since they are fueled from below. But those pins and such are a critical step. Currently all the flight hardware on the market is really for flying the plane, but nobody that I know of makes the external walk around simulator parts, so I started with the landing gear locking pins. These are heavy steel pins that get inserted into the landing gear to prevent them from being able to retract while sitting there. In theory when they fully extend for landing they engage a mechanical lock, but given the planes weigh a big fraction of a million pounds nobody wants to tempt fate so a steel pin into the mechanism prevents someone from accidentally lifting the gear on the ground (remember all the aviation safety things are lessons learned in blood which means someone did that once!) Anyway, it’s not like I am going to go buy an Airbus A320 landing gear strut that weighs several tons and the tires are dangerous beyond belief (they are pressurized to 3000psi!) and that’s not the part I wanted to simulate, I wanted the pins into the struts and when pulled to check that off in the simulator.
That is where the hole is on the Airbus’ nose gear strut. So off to CAD to make a landing strut/tire/wheel assembly I can print. Now you may notice the wheels have flat bottoms because this basically will sit on the counter next to the sim and is there to pull the pin (and there is an indicator LED on the housing which you can see above the red arrow which indicates the steering is active and/or brakes are set (in other words safe or not to tow with a tug).
(that’s a rendering but the parts are printing now, there are 2 tires on the final assembly and 2 steering actuators). Inside the hole (the pins are standard stainless pins for marine use and have a sprung ball bearing on the shaft, and inside the housing above is a microswitch with a roller on the switch arm to sense when the pin is fully inserted. I have a similar mechanism for the pitot tube covers will have a plastic cover and the over will push the switch and perform like the pins for the landing gear. I bought the remove before flying ribbons on amazon and they attach to the split rings on the pins (also amazon). The entire assembly prints without supports and uses M4 bolts to lock the parts together (they have locating pins that lock parts in the right orientation).
but love seeing everything you create.
