Bent Shaft Struts need Straightening

In “Bent Struts”, one of my prior posts, we discussed straightening a slight bend in a strut.  The pictures in that post showed a very minor bend that was hardly noticeable from an untrained eye.

It doesn’t take any training to see the bends in this pair of struts.  The shafts and props tell the full story – a hard grounding.

The machine shop will straightened the shafts after determining no cracks.  The prop shop will recondition the props.  We attempted to straighten these struts by a variety of set-ups in our H-press and straighteners.  Unfortunately the metal memory was hard to overcome.  Next we brought in some heat to move the process along.  After a great deal of care and many attempts to move the struts the inevitable occured – with a loud bang.  The strut cracked.   That condems the struts to scrap metal.  We gave it a good shot but the customer knew the likelyhood of savings these struts was minimal.