I'm gonna let you guys in on a little info a very wise moderator who's name will remain anonymous gave me concerning the nylon landing gear bolts, just a little something to think about. Here it is. If you look at your landings on a scale of 1 to 10 with 10 being the worst in terms of impact, hard landings. While it will require an 8 to 10 type of landing to rip out the landing gear with the regular steel bolts, it may only require like a 6 or 7 type landing to shear off the Nylons bolts. Now where does that landing gear go as the nylon bolts shear off? That's right they tumble underneath your plane & tear the H*&^ out of the bottom of your plane as it goes skidding down the runway. Where as that same 6 or 7 type of landing with steel bolts would have held up & done zero damage to your plane.

The more I thought about what he had said, the more it made perfect sense to me. Both of my Trainers suffered some pretty hard landings in some of my early flights & they are both still in perfect tact.

I know longer buy into the nylon bolts on the landing gear philosiphy. The whole idea behind it is that you won't rip out the landing gear block, but either way if your landing gear comes off you are going to cause some damage to your plane & need to repair it. So the only thing we acomplish by using nylon bolts is putting ourself in a situation where we end up in that have to repair it mode, on landings that might not have been that bad to begin with.