A few months ago, on rollout from landing I felt a slight vibration through the frame … this soon stopped as the speed fell away to walking pace and nothing further ..
I had a quick pull and push of the wheel on parking up but couldn’t really feel anything so shrugged it off as a possible ‘too quick’ landing that had induced some sort of oscillation .. somewhere ….
I flew again early September with Will , no 2 son, and we flew for about an hour over the South coast and on returning to runway 08 at Jersey the slight wind on departure had become 15kt from 360’ … not ideal … on the final bit of approach .. Will said .. “you have control” … he’d done a great job crosswind crabbing to that point
In the final 100’ we entered a bit of down draft and lost about 30’ before my early application of full power pulled her out and we rounded out in ground effect .. just a smidgen too fast ..perhaps around 55 ..
The wheel wobble , shimmy returned .. and was quite pronounced .. going away when we slowed down ..so on hangering I had a really good look and jacked up and removed the port wheel. This showed that the out wheel bearing had just started to show signs of degradation … ie the smooth black cover that circles the roller bearings was slightly uneven on one side .. the outer side.
On reflection running large, low pressure, sticky tyres on a very grippy concrete runway at Jersey for the last 3 years and a total of about 195 landings and miles of taxiing … may just be a little too much for smallish bearings .. which probably expect to be on grass most of the time
Unfortunately the earlier failure of the bearing meant that the wheel hub centre became rounded out and so needed to replace 2 centre hub shells
Jersey Sherwood Ranger 
Leave a Reply