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Gear door issue
Tony;
I can offer a welcome from a fellow Canadian skymaster owner as well (except I now live in the US). I own a 1965 NA, also with long range tanks!
Regarding your gear door problem, I may be able to offer some help, as I struggled with a similar problem for months after my last annual. I could write a novel about all the fun and expense I went through to get to the bottom of it. As it turned out there were multiple issues, and some created along the way of trying to sort out the original problem. But the key culprit was as follows, noting first for you that my problem was normal gear retraction (and momentary gear up light) followed by gear doors closing and then immediately re-opening again. Gear legs would remain up in the wells, but the doors would remain down (and the handle would not return to centre).
What this turned out to be was NOT the rigging of the powerpack microswitch (even though this was checked, re-checked and monkeyed with many times) but rather the rigging of the main gear switches on the saddle "hooks" that the gear lock into. Everything would be fine on jacks (as in your case) but things would go awry in flight. What was happening was that with wind load in flight, the gear legs would be pushed further up into these saddles and with the mechanical play in the saddles, contact would be lost on the main gear microswitches. Switch rigging was much worse on one side than the other, but both turned out to be out of adjustment and finicky to get right. What would happen is that the gear would go up, initial contact of all switches would be made (and gear door close cycle would start) but then contact would be lost as the gear were pushed "too far" up into the saddle by the wind, and then the powerpack door solenoid would tell the doors to re-open and they would stay that way. The problem started as "intermittent" (great!), but then got such that on every cycle the gear, the doors would initially close and then re-open. I understand that in later models there were some subtle changes made to these saddles, so this may be an early model only problem, but I am not 100% sure on this or what was changed. Tom Carr at CPA was a big help to my mechanics as they worked through this and other gear problems I was having at the time.
If you ever want to talk about this in person, just let me know and we can exchange phone numbers and go over it on the phone sometime.
Thanks
Bill Taylor
N2131X Serial #31
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