After scratching my brain cells and moping about how to do this, I had a bit of inspiration from browsing through the Lowe's website. I was searching for springs and stumbled across those spring rods for curtains. Eureka! I knew I had one stashed away in our storage room so I made a straight go for it when I got home from work.
The problem I faced was with the spring. The smaller diameter of wire the less spring resistance there will be. So, I knew I needed something substantial but not too big given the clearance of the steering arm. If you go too large of a wire then you run into compression length. I had to then make a compromise and design the shock with the spring on the outside. Not scale, but functional. Remember, this needs to dampen the tail end of a 13-pound airplane.
Taking some hardened brass tube I had laying around I gathered some other odds and ends to start assembly using mechanical solder. This is sort of like brazing but not exactly.
There is no mechanical piece to keep the shock tubes together other than the form of the assembly itself. However, there is 8mm of overlap between the inner tube and outer tube and that takes away my worry of things ever binding.
Then I had to fabricate the piece that kept breaking. I had previously made it from two layers of brass sheet soldered but it was HEAVY and overly strong. I opted to hack up some scrap steel. Drilling out the holes and then final shaping got the full gear assembled again.
At this point I'm nearly ready to put this back in and give it a test. I'm confident that it will handle the weight but I'll do some extensive taxi testing before I'm fully convinced. As many of you know, I have a very rough runway at my club. I'm hoping this will alleviate some stress there. Also, I'm not too concerned about the bit of weight added from the metal. I was sitting nose-heavy still. This is even after removing an entire row of jugs from the dummy radial. I'll check the CG as well before the next flight.