20010227005409I

(-23) Pilot was flying from tol to grr when he went to put the landing gear down to land at grr, he heard a popping sound. The nose gear was not indicating that it was down. Pilot did a fly-by and the tower said that the nose gear looked partially down. Pilot left the traffic pattern to troubleshoot the problem. He tried recycling the gear lever, manually hand cranking and pulling positive g-s to attempt to make the gear fall out, but none of these were successful. He then decided to fly to cmh, which is his principle operations base so he could talk to a mechanic over the radio. Mechanic said he believed that the nose gear linkage was broken and that he would have to land with the nose gear in whatever position it was currently in. Pilot landed on 28R at cmh and held the nose off of the ground for as long as possible. As soon as the main gear touched down, he pulled the mixture to idle cut-off. The nose then touched down and slid for about 300 feet. Pilot was not injured. After inspecting the a/c broken nose gear linkage was found.