Jim Sower

As near as I can tell, everyone has always had trouble with heat muffs on Lycs. My best information on how to make them work better is as follows: 1. Make your muff surround the exhaust pipe to the extent possible/practical 2. Fill the muff with stainless steel wool (pot scrubbers from the grocery store). They will provide a much greater heated surface area exposed to the air flow and will heat the air much better/hotter. 3. Ventilate the cabin. There is not enough air pressure in the engine compartment to force the air into the cabin if there is no readily available exit. One way to vent the cabin is to open the outboard lower wing bolt access cover and perhaps cover it with a "vent) (opening aft) to draw air out, and then ensure there is a free path for air to flow from the cabin through the spar and out. 4. Be prepared to put some sort of fan in the hot air system (say, in the hell hole or somewhere like that) to increase flow of hot air. 5. If all esle fails, ask me how to build a benign (low pressure) cabin heater using engine oil as the medium. Just a theory .... Jim S.

<... I'm not sure that TIT would vary that much ...> Hmmmm. With wastegate bypassing anywhere from NONE of the exhaust to ALL of it, I would have intuited that TIT would vary a lot. But I guess it doesn't really matter since you're only using it to trim mixture to near peak TIT for a given wastegate setting. It would still tell you what you want to know, just like EGT. <... A knock sensor would be nice but they are expensive and so is the circuitry needed to integrate the input ...> I had always thought that knock sensor was the "blunt instrument" of the inputs to an E-FI-I system. Cheaper than O2 or crank angle or TBI, and when it goes off, unit just knocks a few degrees off the advance every time he hears it (and then starts sneaking back up). Didn't know it was all that tough to buy or integrate. Live and learn .... Jim S.

I thought the parameters that drove Tracy's ECU were MAP, Inlet (charge) temp and RPM. With these you know mass flow which should give you the mass of fuel and therefore pulse width you need. I can see TIT being useful in lieu of EGT as an indicator for "trimming" mixture similar to EGT in a Lyc. That said, I have to wonder how useful it would be with a waste gate since I would expect TIT to be all over the park depending on wastegate position. In any event, I thought Tracy's ECU got you pretty close all by itself, turbo or NA. If I was turbo'd I would be very interested in a knock sensor inputting to advance. Does Tracy have any plans around that, or any kind of detonation protection? What am I missing? .... Jim S.

Joe, Marc "did the math" for you. It's crucial. I feel very strongly that 1g or 0.1oz is the minimum acceptabile granularity. I use a 3-kg or 5-kg capacity scale with 1.0g or 0.1 oz granularity. I would NEVER use anything coarser than that. The mixing table I have posted next to my epoxy storage "oven" has 3 columns. It lists epoxy in 10g increments, appropriate hardener amount in 0.1g accuracy and total weight of the mixture in whole grams. I pour epoxy first and then top it off to the corresponding total weight with hardener. I typically start with 50g (small repair) or more often 100g-200g (MAX) in the cup and add enough hardner to get the right total weight. Very occasionally, I use 10 or 20g epoxy and 5 or 9g hardener for small stuff. The longest day I live, I'll not mix more than 500g of epoxy in one cup, much less 4-5kg. Your choice has 14kg capacity (monumental overkill) but 2-5g granularity (totally unacceptable IMO). The two scales that bracket yours on the list (6001T and i5000) are both much better choices IMO.

The Italian guy's canopy in the link looked MUCH to big and heavy to me to be practical. My plan is to have a gull wing hatch on the port side only for rear seat access. I think this will be adequate since at least 90% of the time the rear seat will be occupied by luggage only. My first notion was to have the flange that the rear edge of the canopy rests on continue on the hatch do that the canopy closes over this flange on the rear hatch and prevents it from opening when the canopy is closed. That way I could have more "nominal" latches on the rear hatch without compromising safety. The downside would be possibly compromised rollover structure if there is no permanent roll bar between the seats.

Actually, I don't think so. I believe there might be something to all this Home Depot foam bit. There's a recent thread on the Cozy list around alternative "flying surface" foam from a guy in Europe or somewhere who can't get the blocks we order from ASS, Wick's. A few years ago I was talking to Jeff Russel about that and he said that if some marking on the billet said some certain category or formulation or something, it was the same stuff and you could use it. I have seen blue "floatation billets" for boat docks that I'm convinced were the exact same stuff that ASS and Wick's sell but was around half the price. I think there are legitimate alternatives to wing core foam but we have to be careful about which of the possible sources are legitimate and which are not. I know my memory is pretty hazy and we need specifics, but I think there's something out there that's well worth pursuing.

<... fuselage ... is an open "C" shape (opening "up") ... very little intrinsic torsional stiffness ... bulkheads provide most of the torsional resistance to "racking" of the fuselage ...> Agreed. The finer points of stress analisys are about 40 yrs behind me, but it seems that the "outside" portion of a bulkhead provides a lot more of the stiffness than the "inside". That is to say that if you cut most of the center out of IP leaving an inch or two around the periphery you would still have pretty substantial torsional stiffness - stiffness disproportionate to the amount of material you left in place. But I am a little murky on the quantitative aspects .... Jim S.

I have used a pump and I love it. I've heard many of the stories of failures, but when you think it through, how many stories would you be hearing (and how would the pump folks stay in business) if the hysterical extrapolations were even remotely accurate. I've also used a scale. I'm doing it now. I'm using 10-year-old Safety-Poxy and Aero-Poxy, each with its own mix ratio - both different from MGS which I'm using on my airplane - to build my work bench and repair the busted furniture that has accumulated since I last mixed flox. My scale is accurate enough, but it is very slow reacting. I pour a little wait and WAIT and the scale finally increments a little, pauses (just long enough for me to start pouring again) and increments some more. I often over-pour one component or the other and have to increase back and forth. Like cutting a little off a table leg to make it quit wobbling.I can't WAIT to get working on the airplane and back to using a pump! Just squeeze and go ... No more calculations ... No more staring at a readout you can bare;u read through the Saran Wrap ... No more back-and-forth trying to even out pour errors ... No more forgetting to select grams instead of ounces No more ....

I've heard of folks (Ez, Cozy, Velocity) who have installed various departures from the plans panel. I first became interested in this when I needed to change the panel on my EZ. Couldn't be done since it's a "structural bulkhead", right? Turns out a number of folks don't see it that way. I heard of various folks who had cut out all but an inch (or less) around the perimiter of their panel and bolted in another with different layout. Another fellow cut his out and replaced it with a new [structural] bulkhead that had a different layout. Others cut it down to the periphery and installed aluminum or whatever panels. There are several bulkheads in the vicinity of your knees. They are all "structural" but the pivotal one is F22 IMO. I am not an expert in structures, but I do know a little about them. If I'm not badly mistaken, the instrument panel's "structural" mission, aside from supporting the instruments, has a whole lot more to do with crashing than flying. It's part of the "compartment" that allegedly protects us when the airplane crashes. The loads on it during normal flight are not severe at all. That said, I plan on reinforcing my panel for an inch or so around the periphery and across it just above the leg holes with several plies of carbon BID. That reinforcement, in the event my panel undergoes significant modification, will tend to compensate for the [structural acerage] lost when I cut out the original panel and replace it with another new one with a different layout. I don't believe the panel structure is a life or death issue. I can't imagine any kind of accident in which a panel crushing because I compromised it would be the difference between surviving or not, or even account for significantly more serious injury. That's my personal view. If I am wrong and crash and my panel collapses needslessly, I have lived an eventful life. Ya' gotta' die of somethin'. .... Jim S.

I would hazard a guess that by the time you are ready for seats, you'll be in a position to make a really well informed decision. At that point, the folks you are alluding to will probably still be there if you decide on their product. If they aren't, you will have discovered that you don't need their stuff. I find it amusing to speculate on stuff that's way out in the future, but it's also habit forming. It's all I can do to stay even moderately focused on the task that's in front of me today.

<... 3. I widened the canopy by two inches and raised it by 1.75 inches ...> What exactly did you do to achieve this? I'm planning to bring the camopy straight up from the fuselage sides to the extent that it's practical, but haven't got much farther than the notion. How did you do your expansion? Inquiring minds need to know ....

<... ....but no insulation behind the drywall. I don't want to tear down all the drywall....if I don't have to ...> There's always celulose insulation. They cut a little (4") hole in the top of each bay (between studs) and blow it in. Much better R factor than fiberglass too. $/R# is lower than fiberglass.

Add to that the reduced bandwidth mentioned already - if I don't care to see the picture, I don't have to wait for it to download along with the text that I do want to see.

That's exactly what he did about 8 or 10 years ago. He called it Catbird. 5-place IIRC, tractor with IO-360. Much faster and longer range than the Defiant that had been his "personal transportation. That has since been replaced by "Boomerang". I think he would do a four place. Catbird was a really slick looking bird. John Roncz flying surfaces and quite a few innovations. I am pretty sure it would be a canard. Burt decided a long time ago that his original notion that canard airplanes are more efficient than conventional layouts was erroneous. He hasn't built a canard since (except for Proteus, which is more of a tandem wing and is much MUCH longer than any canard). He started one helluva movement with the Vari-/Long-EZ and then moved on to bigger and better things. I think he might even consider alernate engines to build it around. His Pond Racer of something over 10 years ago was designed to compete at Reno in the unlimited class and had twin Nissan 300ZX engine tricked up to over 1000 hp each. It's been argued that rotarys would have been a better choice. I talked to Mike Melville a few years ago at OSH and he noted that Burt isn't and doesn't want to be in the engine development business. He's happy and content to leave that to others and use their finished products. Mostly I think he might get a kick out of "one upping" vans and the glasair/velocity crowd. IMO he does exactly that on a pretty regular basis. Last time I was at OSH, Burt announced THREE first flights since he was there the year before. Two of them hadn't even been in the "cocktail napkin" stage the year before. He has designed, built and flown something on the order of forty airplanes since the early 70's, very damn few of which have any particular resemblance to each other or anything else he ever built (unlike the folks he might be trying to "one-up"). I think that pretty well "one-ups" everyone in the history of aviation - Van's, Glassair, Velocity folks included - along with Kelly Johnson, Marty Signorelli et al. I'm satisfied that he is the most prolific, innovative engineer in the history of aviation or pretty much anything else.

Joe, I posted my reply to your query on the "Where and What Comnposites" thread.

For openers, it's a PUSHER. By definition, the engine noise is behind you, receding (instead of in front of you washing over you). It IS a good bit quieter than a spam can. You still need head sets (if for no other reason than to talk on the radio). My EZ (~200 hrs) and Velocity (~200 hrs) are significantly quieter than the Grumman I used to own (300 hrs) and any Cessna (30?) I've been in. I'm not at all certain that it is possible to quiet the airplane enough to converse comfortably with no head set. If it were possible, I seriously doubt it would be affordable or light enough. I have 1/2" thick soft foam upholstery in my Velocity and I can't say it deadens sound much at all. When I tear up the roof to downdraft the engine, I might dispense with that foam unless I find that it's really REALLY easy to replace. The Cozy is only very marginally a 4-place airplane anyway. 100# of sound deadening equipment would be a LOT more trouble than it's worth IMO. The Cozy built to plans with the design materials is more than strong enough. Changing any structural materials would be an exercize in guilding the lilly, and would almost certainly get you INTO more trouble than it got you OUT OF. That said, I believe that there are some legitimate uses for "trick" materials (but in non structural areas). For example, my cowl has been off so many times that the holes are getting all wallowed out. I'm going to strip off the paint and lay up a strip of carbon fiber BID around the edges to stiffen them up and make the screw holes more robust. As for general structures, I've heard so many horror stories about trying to work with kevlar that I'm not going to touch it for anything, with the possible exception of a patch under the hockey puck on the nose so as to minimize damage in the event of a gear up landing - and I might find carbon fiber a better choice for that too.

Trouble with CS props on pushers is the extra loads on the hub and blade base. Nobody knows for sure just HOW much more stressful it is, and it probably varies substantially from one plane to another. ALL CS props are designed for tractors, and the manufacturers who have what they feel is a stout enough design allow it to be used on pushers. I'm afraid I'll have to stay with fixed pitch for the forseeable future. Besides, I couldn't afford a CS prop even if I had a tractor.

The electric clothes are a pretty smart current drain, and a HELLISH $-drain!! That money would buy an electric nose lift. And what do you do when you get where you're going? How far can you walk in those $60 socks before you screw up the circuity? I'll still have to go with heat that's already there and has to be rejected somewhere anyway. The more passive and benign the better. I've flown really cold airplanes and I don't need to do that again. Heat muff, passive oil, whatever, but no electric briches for me.

OK. To each his own. But my system makes NO intrusion into the engine oil system. It merely takes advantage of the hot oil in the pan to heat another passive oil circulation system. No engine oil leaves the engine. The lubrication system you have in place is not touched or modified in any way. Anyway, electric britches seem to be an option although I don't know what you do with them when you get out of the airplane. Wear them to the business meeting you were going to? Roam around Sun-Fun or whatever in your electric jump suit? Looking at the BTU you'd need out of an electric cockpit heater and converting it to watts could make for a pretty substantial load on your electrical system. Seems best to look for a heat source that's already there. Which brings you back to heat muff.

Rather than a heat muff (cracks, CO, difficult to get it to the cabin, etc.) if I had an air cooled engine I would use low pressure oil for cabin heat. Get a small heat exchanger (like the power steering coolers on many american cars), or perhaps something a little more elaborate (like the smallest oil cooler you can by). Put an array of tubing in the oil pan (properly lashed down) - about 4 passes should be more than enough. Bring the tubing out of the pan fairly high (at the about 5 qt level) and plumb it through a small electric pump to the "oil cooler". Fill the system with low viscosity oil (like ATF) and you're ready to go. Bilge air blower will recirculate cabin air throught the heat exchanger while the little electric oil pump is on circulating the oil. Very few, vary benign failure modes: Plumbing leaks outside the pan (in the cabin) - you lose a pint or so of ATF; Plumbing leaks inside the pan - you dilute your engine oil with a pint or so of ATF; Oil pump or air blower failure - you get cold; leak where tubing penetrates oil pan - you lose the oil above the 5 qt or so level (but it would make a big mess before it leaked as much as a cup). Simple, not terribly difficult to install, pretty cheap, weighs maybe 4 or 5 lbs. Just a theory ....

Agreed. I've no problem with that notion at all. Like, you either say it or you don't. What I'm laughing at so much is the all those silly dots and * and all. Now, you know how mightily amused I get at irony and hypocrisy. I think it's hilarious that some folks get so anal about a little emphasis if you spell it right but it seems to be OK and acceptable so long as you spell it wrong. My friend, I believe that notion has all the intellectual alure, if I may use your scenario, of saying all of the exact same things we had been saying before we relocated to that 5* bistro with the ladies and that prissy third couple - but now we make it all socially acceptable by saying certain selected words in "pig-latin". <... Remember the Officer's Mess? ...> Don't get me started on what you hear in there ... <...you never know who you're talking to. That third couple is lurking all the time and might be offended ...> You know I mean no offense (usually). This stuff (see - ain't you proud of me?) is often useful for emphasis. And color, of course. My daddy always told me "... if you can't be good - be colorful ...". I can be patient with some folks who get anal (or should I say a**l) about every little thing, and enough is enough. You know that I will take the bit in my teeth from time to time and "overemphasize" a little. I hadn't noticed that I was getting excited. I'll endeavor to behave better (for a while). PS Joe, let your conscience be your guide.

Yes, I suppose I could do that. But I'll have to admit that I'm pretty dumbfounded at the request. Somebody's going to have to help me out here: A) It's crude and lowbrow and gross to use common, everyday words .... B) It's perfectly acceptable however, if you replace an internal letter with some special character .... Is this an airplane building and aviation information exchange, or the "Ladies' Auxiliary" to something? What exactly are we pretending not to do or say by sticking a * in the middle of some words? Am I missing out on some secret magic way to deflect the Wrath of God? Or sister Mary Ruth? Jeeze! (or should I say J**ze?) I feel like I'm back in grammar school snickering and whispering in the corner of the school yard. How is this not juvenile silliness and hypocritical bullp**p? Someone help me please ....

No doubt. If you have a carburated engine. Fuel injected engines don't HAVE carb heat because they don't need them. The reason they call it "carb ice" is because it happens in carbs. Discussions of "throttle body ice" are less common. <... I think it is very important to discuss what may have happened, simply so we can prevent it happening again...> Preventing it from happening again is, after all, the object of the exercise. For the purpose of training ourselves (nobody told me that canards in a descent could vent fuel lines) I would suggest that discussing what might have happened is as valuable as discussing what did happen. I do a lot of things that are not taught and not [widely] published. I have seen more than enough of my friends die from not knowing stuff that I came up with from playing "what if" on those long drives across Texas. What might have happened to Rich could end up helping more people than what did happen. Speculation on causes of accidents almost invariably deteriorate into harsh criticisms of the poor slob that busted his airplane (and his ass?) based on thin evidence. S--t happens. In this case, I believe it's all in a good cause (sticks and stones ....) if someone gets something valuable out of the process. <...It is often not one simple factor that causes a crash, but a train of errors ...> I would suggest that it's never a single failure. The purpose of all of my studying and cogitating and gaming (what if ...) is not to prevent failures, because that is impossible. It is to maximize the number of failures that must be strung together to cause a FAILURE. Would you feel more comfortable with a 1/1,000,000 failure mode that would kill you, or four 1/100 failure modes that have to be strung together? ... it doesn't matter what you do, so long as you recover well ...

IIRC Burt started the two-cup method so as to enable us to build a (balance) scale out of a stick, a couple of small boards and a nail. That made the airplane $80 cheaper to build. Balance scales require two cups and thence the bit about wetting the cups with what you recon will not pour out when you're done. A real PITA, not to mention the errors it can introduce. No reason at all for more than one cup if you're not using a balance scale. More better use a postage scale with a "metering table" and a West pump (or, like I have, a mustard/ketsup pump from local food service store for a couple of bucks). Pouring from the can/bottle sucks in my experience - I invariably over- or under-pour. I use postage scale and mustard pumps and a single cup for the 10-year old EZ-Poxy on my workbench, but when it gets to the actual airplane I'll be switching to MGS 285 and a calibrated pump.

True enough. We don't have all the facts. I read the preliminary report and it was not notably enlightening ... no "smoking gun" and no clue, really, as to what actually took place. Lots of possibilities, no hard facts. It did renew my faith in a couple of superstitions I've been carrying aroung for some years now. Like I stay away from idle descents. I've heard all the old wives tales about shock cooling, but on a few occasions I tried that out, my CHTs didn't change much from idle to 18" MAP, but I stay away from idle anyway. I endeavor to descend at roughly the power setting it takes to maintain 100 kts @ 1000'. If I get too close, I deploy the belly board. If I get waaay too close, I S-turn or do a 360 but I keep power on. I do this mainly so that if the engine does stop (as they're known to do from time to time when at idle), I'll know much sooner if I have some power on than if I don't. The sooner I discover my engine has stopped, the more likely I am going to be able to re-start it or pick the least terrible spot to crash. I've discovered that in an idle descent, particularly a faster one (more nose down) you vent the fuel lines coming out of the strake with a lot more fuel on board than one would guess (anoher compelling reason for a fuel sump in my Cozy IMO). I've had that happen just experimenting in my Velocity ... near the end a descent from high altitude, I had the sump low fuel light come on when I knew I had something on the order of 5 gal in each strake. I had vented the strake fuel lines right at the start, and by the time I got down low, I had burned off the top little bit in the sump and activated the low fuel warning. I pulled the nose up and in a few seconds the light went out. If I'd been in my EZ, the first warning I would have gotten would have been the silence, and at idle, who knows how long it would have taken me to notice it. The insidious part of this phenomenon is that it flies in the face of conventional procedures - we're taught that when the engine fails, set up max range glide and do your stuff with re-start attempts, forced landing, etc. - but the glide attitude might be what got you into trouble. For my EZ, as I turn on my boost pump, I pull the nose UP, at least high enough and long enough to ensure that the blisters are full, and then start to set up my glide, etc. I don't recall how much fuel Rich had on board or how much was in the selected tank. I seem to recall the FAA said one tank was empty, but with the airplane that torn up, it could have leaked out. Besides that, Rich said he started with a lot more fuel on board than he could have burned on that trip, and I have to go with that pretty much. Just a theory .... Jim S.