Stuck overun brake.

George wrote:
Try to apply torsion many times. Left, right, left, right.....
George

All the previous suggestions have merit for this and various other
Cobra/Komet trailer ailments, of which there are many. But George has
the right idea: when this happened to me, I took a long (six feet)
steel bar and placed one end of it perpendicular to the front of the
tongue, then wrapped a chain around the intersection to fix it. I then
pulled up/pushed down on the other end of the bar to twist the movable
part of the tongue. Simultaneously I applied fore/aft force, though it
would have been easier with more people and/or using a tow vehicle. The
combination of torsion and axial force gradually loosened it.

My problem had nothing to do--this time--with the brake shoes rusting
to the drums (that used to happen regularly until I found a way to park
it by chocking the wheels instead of using the parking brake). It was
caused by water getting into the mechanism and corroding the underside
of the "piston" (i.e., the inner tube) that slides in the plastic
bearings inside the immovable part of the tongue (i.e., the outer
tube). It took a lot of filing and smoothing to clean things up.
Chucking the whole inner tongue assembly in a big lathe would have made
it easier.

Also, the aft plastic bearing seemed to have swollen and it required
opening up with some careful grinding/sanding. Regular lubrication
should ward off some of these problems but you need to cycle the tongue
fore/aft every once in a while (i.e., drive it around the block) to
distribute the grease.

Of course, the best preventative maintenance is to take the glider to a
contest at least two or three times every year. Not only will it keep
the moving parts loose but anything that can go wrong is bound to
happen in the middle of a contest where you've got a lot of people
around to help.

Chip Bearden
ASW 24 "JB"