Guys many thanks
Max Torque you are a star. Thank you for taking all the trouble you have taken to describe in detail the potential nose landing gear problems. Your information seems to match an incident my friend had with his BE200 as you described. He was very happy with this info as he felt that he was unjustly under criticism that he may have made a hard landing. It’s always easy to blame the pilot in first instance. I know him well has a couple of thousand hours on type and is one of the better pilots I know.
Will report back to you in due course if not by e-mail.
In meantime I will lookout to the secret live of ‘your’ microswitch....
Take care
L-X