Taylorcraft Part shortage

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Wag -Aero sold to Aircraft Spruce.

I needed a rear strut for my plane and had to buy a strut from Univair. I got a hold of the previous owner at Wag Aero and was told they had no struts and could not do any repairs on struts, they sold there inventory to Aircraft spruce.

[Hank Jarrett]

This problem is NOT going to go away. We need to make sure we don't trash ANY damaged or corroded struts and find a source for streamlined tubing to repair old struts. I have a stack of bent and or corroded struts in my hangar and a design for a manufacturing fixture. Other than the end fittings struts are NOT complicated parts to build.

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Hank,

I've seen more than 1 method of creating streamline tubes. The most commonly accepted today appears to be using roll-form method using 4130 seamless steel tube. There are several companies that advertise these streamline shapes. Some of these suppliers claim to offer custom sizes. Are there testing requirements or material certs. that would be required to use shapes from these sources?
I have a set of struts from my BC65 that have a welded trailing edge so they could have been formed on a press brake. The weld appears to have been done in a machine process. First time I've seen struts like this. Not sure which I find more favorable to make.
Your thoughts?

Brent

[blue_ridge]

I think the Luscombe owners created a foundation and build parts as a non-profit??? I remember an article about Cub Crafters where they could build Piper Super Cub parts as long as they met the certified parts standard. I think Piper sued them for this and lost. Anybody know more about this?

[Hank Jarrett]

Not sure a foundation making them would work (because of the cost). It would need to be checked but I think you would have to get a PMA and that would probably be big bucks. I think the most affordable method would be as owner produced parts where the final user of the strut would have to be "involved" in the process. It is NOT hard to meet the requirement and I have worked with several people when I made parts so they were "involved in the process". If Brent can get more info on who rolls streamlined tube that would be a big help. The size of the struts slowly increased over the years and I have numerous non-airworthy struts of different dimensions. When F-19 production started the struts were HUGE!!! Every time the rollers were machined to take out wear marks the struts got a little bigger. I would think for any pre-war plane the size of my original 1945 struts should be good. They would be at least as large as all of the pre-wars and are defiantly bigger than my 42 struts. For BC-12 from 46 on we would need to get an ORIGINAL strut to make sure we made large enough tubes (my 45 struts probably ARE BC12-D post war size). The FAA will let you go bigger, but not smaller. I have looked at a lot of old, inspection failed struts and the welded ends seem to always look good (unless someone leaned them against a hangar wall submerged in water). There should be no reason we couldn't cut the ends off of a failed inspection strut, blasted and cleaned them and then ground the welded area to fit new tubes. Some time back I designed a fixture to hold end fittings correctly so a new tube could be welded in. We could probably get the FAA to allow us to seal them when we built them up so they wouldn't need recurrent inspection. No idea where the drawing is any more but I am sure I could reproduce it. As I remember you could pin the fixture at the end to allow for different strut end angles. Probably easier to just have two different angle fittings to connect to. The fixture was welded to a long piece of "I" beam an.d you could put rear strut fittings on one side and front on the other. Just a tad over engineered, but you wouldn't have to worry about it getting damaged.

Hank