Assistance with Purchase of my first canard (Cozy MkIV) near Denver.

[vh2q]

I have purchased a Cozy that belonged to a gent by the name of Dalrymple who has passed. It's in pieces but was flying for several years, has not flown for about 15. Looks like he was tinkering with the engine cover and maybe avionics because the radios and transponder are out. Lycoming 320 doesn't have a lot of hours on it. We have the logbooks which appear to be complete, including the engine logbook which predates the Cozy but was rebuilt before it was installed.

I am looking to hire someone to do a prebuy including removal and examination of one jug and the cam lobes. This person should know something about engines obviously, and also composite canards. Cozy knowhow would be A+. Ideally, a person with a detective bent who can figure out why Dalrymple took it all apart.

Then if that's OK, I need to get it to TX. Plan A is to hire someone to put it back together in situ and get it airworthy so we can fly it down here. Plan B is to load it all on a truck. 

Correspond by email as I am traveling through middle Feb. russ at victor hotel 2 quebec dot com. If that does not work or is not permitted for some reason, I will check PMs.

Looking forward to flying my Cozy!

[vh2q]

Well it's a mk3 .. shows how much I do need help. 

[jridge]

I sued Marc Zeitlin at Burnside Aerospace for my pre-buy.

 

https://www.burnsideaerospace.com/

[zolotiyeruki]

6 hours ago, jridge said:

I sued Marc Zeitlin at Burnside Aerospace for my pre-buy.

 

https://www.burnsideaerospace.com/

I sure hope you meant "used" there

[Anthony P]

Seems a little late for a prebuy.

[vh2q]

Deal is contingent. That's pretty normal.

 

Zeitlin guy is near LA. Thinking there must be someone near Denver who is composite-savvy.

[jridge]

 

17 hours ago, zolotiyeruki said:

I sure hope you meant "used" there

Yeah.  I can't type.

[jridge]

14 hours ago, vh2q said:

Deal is contingent. That's pretty normal.

 

Zeitlin guy is near LA. Thinking there must be someone near Denver who is composite-savvy.

Can try Burrall Sanders at Freeflight Composites.  He's just outside of Colorado Springs.

https://www.freeflightcomposites.com/

[Marc Zeitlin]

17 hours ago, jridge said:

Can try Burrall Sanders at Freeflight Composites.  He's just outside of Colorado Springs.

https://www.freeflightcomposites.com/

While FFC is still at Meadowlake airport (KFLY) it's been owned by Ryan Goodman for a number of years now - Burrall retired a while back.

[vh2q]

Can't raise these guys (Freeflight), neither by phone or email. Mike Cronk is going to check it out for me. Logbook says 900 lbs + useful which is a surprise.

 

[Marc Zeitlin]

10 hours ago, vh2q said:

Can't raise these guys (Freeflight), neither by phone or email. Mike Cronk is going to check it out for me. Logbook says 900 lbs + useful which is a surprise.

Who is Mike Cronk, and what are his bona fides?

If a COZY III actually weighs 900 lb, that's a pretty light COZY III. I'm skeptical.

[vh2q]

He's a generic A&P out of Denver, works for some outfit that services small jets. That's the only guy I could come up with. I don't think he knows anything about composites.

 

The logbook indicates useful load 931 not gross. 

[vh2q]

Seems the paste did not work. Empty 1069 useful 931 so max gross 2000 w O320. That's good news as I am 240.

[Kent Ashton]

2 hours ago, vh2q said:

He's a generic A&P out of Denver, works for some outfit that services small jets. That's the only guy I could come up with. I don't think he knows anything about composites.

Confused.  Did you buy this airplane or are you still negotiating?

If you can't hook up with Zeitlin, a generic A&P might tell you something useful about the engine but there are likely a dozen canard builders and owners in Colorado who might tell you more about the airplane.  I would join COBA   https://canardowners.com/   and look COBA's membership for those around you or contact EAA chapters (see EAA.org).  Most owners would be willing to take a look for a hamburger.    There are many good youtubes and websites showing how to remove a cylinder and borescope an engine--it is actually pretty easy but there are some cautions about not turning the crank, etc.  If you own the airplane you might as well learn how to do it.  If not, the owner might not want you taking the engine apart.  I wouldn't.

[Marc Zeitlin]

4 hours ago, vh2q said:

He's a generic A&P out of Denver, works for some outfit that services small jets. That's the only guy I could come up with. I don't think he knows anything about composites.

Then he will be useless for everything except POSSIBLY the engine examination, _IF_ he knows something about piston engines along with jets. He might be exactly the opposite of what you're looking for.

4 hours ago, vh2q said:

Empty 1069 useful 931 so max gross 2000 w O320. That's good news as I am 240.

The fact that someone wrote a number in a logbook does not make it a safe #. The COZY III was originally designed as a 1500 lb. MGW aircraft, with an allowance to go to 1600 lb. for takeoff. The V/N diagram in the POH shows that it's a 3.8G aircraft at that weight (I assume, 1500 lb., not 1600 lb.). The fact that someone SAYS that you can load it to 2000 lb. is utterly meaningless. A VERY ROUGH handwaving comparison will indicate that if the plane is a 3.8G plane at 1500 lb, then it would be a 2.8G plane at 2000 lb. While 2.8G gusts are not common, they're not unknown, either. And your Va (maneuvering speed) with a 2.8G limit drops precipitously as well, as does Vb (gust penetration speed).

If the plane weighs 1069 (which will be suspect until you do your own W&B) and you weigh 240, that's 1309 lb. Add 40 gallons of fuel (240 lb) and you're at 1549 lb - above standard MGW and barely below the max takeoff weight allowed by the POH of 1600 lb. Add some baggage and you're at 1600 lb., and you've got yourself a heavy single seater. Add another 200 lb. person and you're at 1800 lb.

Now, do folks fly COZY III's at 1600 - 1800 lb, fairly regularly? Yes. Are most canard overweight? Yes. Have any failed structurally due to this? No. Does that mean that one can be cavalier about ignoring POH weight restrictions without understanding all of the ramifications of flying overweight? No. Are there other folks that weigh 240 lb that fly 1100 lb. COZY III's fairly regularly, sometimes with a 2nd person and baggage? Yes.

But you need to understand what it all means and how all the parts play together.

Get someone familiar with canard composite construction to look at the plane. There are a zillion of them in the Denver area and if you were on the COBA mailing list, it would take all of about 5 minutes to find them. Keep trying FFC as well.

[vh2q]

Mark, the guy that built the plane, was an FAA engineer, DAR, commercial pilot, and a BSEE. If that counts for anything. Is it possible he built the plane a bit sturdier to achieve 2000 max gross? If so, what evidence would we look for? I am really not interested in a one person plane with 3 seats that might lose a wing if it hit an air pocket in a turn. I already own a plane with 750lb useful.

[Kent Ashton]

4 hours ago, vh2q said:

Mark, the guy that built the plane, was an FAA engineer, DAR, commercial pilot, and a BSEE. If that counts for anything. Is it possible he built the plane a bit sturdier to achieve 2000 max gross? If so, what evidence would we look for? I am really not interested in a one person plane with 3 seats that might lose a wing if it hit an air pocket in a turn. I already own a plane with 750lb useful.

I used to own a Cozy III.  IMO it is not so much the gross weight--most builds are pretty stout--but the front-seat weight.  You are 240.  Designer Nat Puffer was, I'm guessing, maybe 175 lbs and his wife Shirley was maybe 110 lbs.  It was fine for them, but that's one reason why Nat designed the bigger C-IV.  The front-seat weight affects how fast the airplane must go before the canard can lift the nose and rotate the aircraft for takeoff.  It also impacts landing speed.  I was 225 when I flew mine and I flew once with a similar-weight fellow but takeoff speed was noticeably higher and I didn't want to have an off-airport landing in it.  It's like flying a Long-EZ with two people in the front seat.  I had the old GU canard which was affected by moisture, too.  One time I took off with my Dad on a moist, foggy day and almost ran off the end of a 3200' runway before I could rotate.  Scared the heck out of me.

I moved my battery around to try to reduce the load in the nose but it cost me some room in back.  I never tried to carry a third person in the C-III.  I eventually build a Roncz canard for it but I still consider it a marginal airplane for big people.

Edited February 5 by Kent Ashton

[Marc Zeitlin]

5 hours ago, vh2q said:

Mark, the guy that built the plane, was an FAA engineer, DAR, commercial pilot, and a BSEE. If that counts for anything. Is it possible he built the plane a bit sturdier to achieve 2000 max gross? If so, what evidence would we look for? I am really not interested in a one person plane with 3 seats that might lose a wing if it hit an air pocket in a turn. I already own a plane with 750lb useful.

Kent gave some good feedback above. The builder's resume' means diddly squat. I've seen crap built by people that had amazing resume's, and excellent work by folks that were gas station attendants. Is it POSSIBLE that he did something that would increase the MGW and keep the structural safety factors per plans? Sure. it's POSSIBLE. But extremely unlikely, and unless you had documentation of it in the build records, you can't assume it.

As I previously said, folks DO fly these planes overweight (per the designer's POH) regularly, and THEY NEVER STRUCTURALLY FAIL. Let's go through some rough handwaving as to structural strength... The Long-EZ was a 5G plane at 1325 lb. MGW. The COZY III is essentially structurally identical to the Long-EZ, so at 1500 lb. (POH MGW) would be, purely by ratio, a 4.4G plane. But Nat was conservative and said 3.8G. Continuing the ratioing from the Long-EZ, at 2000 lb., the COZY III would be a 3.3G plane.

Now, Burt probably had at least a safety factor of 2X on the structure - some think it was closer to 3X, but we'll be conservative and use 2X, since that's usually what's used for composite structures. Which means that one would not expect a COZY III to fail until reaching 6.6G. Limiting it to the Normal Category 3.8G gives a safety factor of 1.7X - below 2X, but above the metal SF of 1.5X.

The issue here is that there's a lot of variability in build quality - a perfect build might withstand 3X the limit load of 3.8G, while a crappy build might be a LOT less. And there's no way to know without test data from Phase I whether the plane was ever tested to 3.8G when loaded to 2K lb.

Also, as stated this is a lot of handwaving, and while the wings/canard/main spar are almost certainly never going to fail unless you do something amazingly stupid in the plane (none ever have failed, in any VE, LE or COZY of any type - you're not going to lose a wing), overloading the landing gear on a VE/LE/COZY III is a recipe for required repairs down the road (could be next year, could be 20 years from now - also dependent upon original build quality and number of hard landings and pothole taxiing).

So I can't say it's fine to load a COZY III to 2K lb. You're not going to fail in the air. But you'll beat the crap out of the landing gear.

As Kent said, you need to examine the W&B very carefully to understand the maximum load for the front seat (Nat weighed about 140 lb. soaking wet) - many COZY III's are in the 340 - 360 lb. range so you'd only be able to take very small people with you. And even if you do only want to take small folks, you'd be operating at the forward end of the CG range, so would need longer runways, faster takeoff/landing speeds, and you'd cruise slower.

I'm not trying to discourage you from buying the plane - if you're going to fly solo 95% of the time and can put all the extra weight you're going to carry in the back seat, where it doesn't move CG forward, it could be fine. But you should understand all of the ramifications.

There's a reason these planes are called "COZY", not "ROOMY".

[vh2q]

Yeah it's starting to look like a mkIV might be a better choice. I did touch base with Free Flight and they agreed to go take a look, will await their take on it. It's pretty much apart so they can get a good look. It may be that the reason this plane has sat since 2009 (about the time it was relocated from CA to CO) is that the builder flew it heavy and stressed the LG, took it apart, and then gave up. He passed unexpectedly in 2023 so he allowed it to gather dust for more than a decade. 

Wife is 110 so we average out at 175!

You guys have been most helpful.

[vh2q]

Josiah from FF looked it over, specifically to look for evidence the plane was modified correctly for 2000lb gross. He found that it's a standard Cozy III build, rear seat omitted, no reinforcement of the landing gear. So on that basis I passed, as my current bird has more useful load than a standard Cozy III.

I did learn from this experience that the Cozy IV may fit the bill, if I can find one pref somewhere nearer BWD which is home base (central TX).