If any of you have a suggestion, I’d appreciate your input.
On my last flight home, with no early signs of failure, my gear pump was tripping on about every 2 seconds to maintain pressure. I figured I had a leaky actuator and would have to rebuild it to resolve this; no big deal. I found one leaking and figured where there is one, there may be more. So, I’m rebuilding all of them. But, before doing so, I put a gauge on the high pressure side of the pump to see if I had internal leaks there too. What I found was that my pump will only pressurize to about 950 psi (should be ~1200 psi) and then it bleeds down slowly. I tried to adjust the pressure switch but it made very little difference. To verify the bleeding, I isolated all actuators out of the system except the nose wheel. I put the gauge on the high pressure side of the NW actuator line, selected gear up to pressurize the system, and then quickly crawled under the plane to look at the gauge. It was bleeding down so fast that by the time I got down there to look at it (~2 sec.), it had already lost about 200 psi and then bled down the rest of the way in about 7 more seconds. So, and here’s the question, do I have a faulty gear dump valve, a leaky pump, or both?
Danny
LNC2-360, ~550 hours
N 38° 43' 25.7"
W 77° 30' 38.6"