Tow out gear

[mwestphal]

Has anyone built a tow out gear for moving the Ximango around on the ground. If so, can you tell me how you did it?
Thanks,
Mark Westphal
200-054

[Steve Sliwa]

Hi Mark

XimangoUSA made a towbar for me that hooks onto tailwheel and can be used with a golf cart to by hand to move the bird around.

I will try to get a picture this weekend and post.

[Cliff Goldman]

Hi Steve --

I'd sure like to see the picture of your towbar. I built an electric tug (110V) last year but have never been able to come up with an effective means of hooking up to the tailwheel. Will be glad to post pix of my concoction if anyone is interested. Does anyone have a source for a suitable DC drive motor, preferrably a gearmotor -- my extension cord is too short.

Cliff
200.160

[John Lawton]

Does anyone have a source for a suitable DC drive motor, preferrably a gearmotor -- my extension cord is too short.

Hey Cliff,

I have one of those "Nose dragger dragger's" left over from the previous owner of my strip. I've thought about modifying it so that it could be a "tail wheel dragger". This gizmo uses a 12V starter motor and a battery. The motor seems pretty generic, like an AC/Delco off a 70's Chevy truck or something similar. As is, it seems like it would need something to put more weight on the drive wheels to work as a tail wheel dragger. For nose wheel operation the nose wheel actually sits in a cradle and that puts weight on the drive wheels. I tried to pull mine in the hangar one day with this thing using a short length of rope tied to the tail wheel. Without that weight it just spins the wheels.

Steve, I'd love to see those pictures, too. I currently push mine in backwards from the tail area, but that leaves finger prints everywhere I touch it.

Regards,

John Lawton
Whitwell, TN (TN89)
Ximango #135

[Steve Sliwa]

Hi gang:

I posted some shots of the towbar. The weather has been poor around here so I finally went out today in a rainstorm and took pictures in the hangar.

I was hoping to get more action shots (with the gorge in the background, of course). Here are some thumbnails that hyperlink to the pictures, but feel free to check the gallery for all of the pictures.



By the way, people know that if you load pictures into the gallery (or a local forum album) you can past the pictures into a post quite easily by using the "[Insert]" text off the right of the edit box right under the smilies. That is a hack I downloaded from a forum someplace and it avoids having to know the URL of a picture uploaded somewhere.

[Cliff Goldman]

Thanks Steve. The 2nd picture is what I needed. I've been fighting trying to come up with a way to hook up to the axle, never found a way to make it stay connected when I tried to turn.
Cliff

[Keith]

Originally Posted by Steve Sliwa

Hi gang:

I posted some shots of the towbar. The weather has been poor around here so I finally went out today in a rainstorm and took pictures in the hangar.

I was hoping to get more action shots (with the gorge in the background, of course). Here are some thumbnails that hyperlink to the pictures, but feel free to check the gallery for all of the pictures.



By the way, people know that if you load pictures into the gallery (or a local forum album) you can past the pictures into a post quite easily by using the "[Insert]" text off the right of the edit box right under the smilies. That is a hack I downloaded from a forum someplace and it avoids having to know the URL of a picture uploaded somewhere.

Hi Steve. I would be interested to know if anyone has modified this tow bar to fit a Grob 109b. The tailwheel fork looks very much like my Grob's.