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Alec is considering canting the nose gear 5 degrees forward in order to increase the resistance to unintended retraction. I don't think this will accomplish the desired results and may have unintended negative consequences.

Assuming a nose wheel load of 400#s (I seem to recall having to put 200 pounds of lead on the engine mount when the 600# engine was removed) and a nose gear angle of 5 degrees then the forward component would be 400 tan5 or 35 pounds, AKA "not much".

The bad news is that the nose wheel has about 1.8" of caster. As soon as you incline the nose gear axis off of vertical (forward) the nose gear wants to spin 180 degrees. The resulting torque is in opposition to the castering torque and may lead to, or exasperate,  nose gear shimmy.

I am unaware or any nose gear failure that would have been prevented by raking the nose gear off of vertical.

Regards
Brent Regan

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