act Fred Weick once told me that the cable makes the airplane slower because the wheel is in the prop slipstream. Also as you mentioned the fairing does not work, an the main problem is that the strut will not work until it is fully extended so you are landing on the taxi spring and possibly damaging it.
I believe that the restraint wire is actually part and parcel of the dual fork. The dual
fork is longer than the original gear, and sticks down far enough that someone who
lands flat may very well land on the nose wheel. You only have to crawl around
at an Ercoupe gathering to discover how many of these planes have a history
of a nose gear collapse, as evidenced by the wrinkled bellies.
Unfortunately, this risk only increases with the (questionable) 415D mod's loss
of elevator authority. D-pilots tend to land on the flat side...they kind of have to.
You can't hold it back and hold it off as easily as you can with a -C or -E style
elevator. You have to be right on airspeed to avoid either ballooning or plopping.
Either a balloon or a plop can put a D's nose gear down first. I admit that on
N2906H I just accepted defeat and did a ker-plop landing about 5 MPH fast
most of the time. The 'ker' being the mains and the 'plop' being the nose gear
just after.
The bad pattern seems to be 1) touch nose gear first 2) bounce badly due to the pitch
up which results 3) repeat (1) and (2) until 4) the nose gear collapses.
One of the more notorious denizens of this list, who flew a Coupe that sounded
like it was the next thing to scrap managed to do just that. By the time he was
done PIO-ing around with it, it wasn't the 'next thing' any more. He then came and
ranted about what a crappy design the Ercoupe was, and stomped off and bought
a T-Craft. He then later be found over on the T-Craft list bitching about what a bad
design THAT was because he couldn't even hardly taxi it.
I think even the long-suffering Forrest Barber gave up on him :-)
Anyway, I digress...the cable is there on the dual fork for a reason. Yes, it
has its down-side, which is a lot less down-side than a nose gear collapse.
Even Uncle Fred's wisdom on this has to be taken with a grain of salt; engineers
don't generally like people screwing with their designs, especially after they've
made a conscious decision, as Fred did, about the original nose gear design.
His point about the taxi spring and the fact that the strut doesn't load up with
oil on the right side of the valve is well taken...and can't really be helped with
the dual fork system.
Greg
