dust

My friend the accident investigator/7000 hour pilot overules all else in concerns to safty. One mfg had vapor lock at 9500 feet because bubbles came out of fuel at that altitude and blocked the return lines, thats why they went to larger diameter fuel lines. isn't the fuel pump near the engine? if that is the case, then you just need volume to feed the high preasure at the engine and the larger lines do that and the larger returns insure that any bubles won't block the flow. I know i am kicking a dead horse, but, few people have seen what my friend has seen! The one mfg lost a number of planes before they found out that the returns needed to be bigger and piped to the top of the tank. I know i seem to simplify it but my system will be just that, one valve at my fingertips, large lines to and from.

Thanks john - will probably send check next week, won't take delivery for a year and a half or so, but price break is good until end of the month!!!

john, I have two hobbies, furniture building and airplane building. I build furniture m-f 7 to 10 and sunday 10 to 5, except when my wife neeeds me elsewhere and as I build everything for her or our family, that's not often. The last item I built was a small chest of drawers with concave sides and fronts and a real gloss finish - five and a half months on the above schedule, the finish took 6 weeks. But I have too admit that building 4 wings gets old, 28 weeks of the same thing calls for a celebration, hell finishing a chapter calls for one, for that matter, just a sentence can sometimes be a major accomplishment! I remember chap 7 curving the bottom corners, the sanding forms, the templetes, the pour foam and sanding again and again, oh - thats right I didn't do that - one of my partners did, but I gotta tell you, I got tired just watching him. Your finish trick is a standard one on furniture, shine a light at an angle and the imperfections pop out at you, alop try switching sanding patterns when you switch grit back forth/side to side/circular. I actually love to sand, I just go into never never land and do it, sometimes for weeks on end, well I'll rattle on later, BTW you have done bueatiful work and your input to the groups is exemplary!

figured I'd bore youuns some more, finished third wing in jig two weeks ago and started 4th wing last saturday, sure is fun doing things the last time. This is that last time we will cut the alerion cuttout and can give the templates away, the is the last time we can cut the electrical hole in the wrong place and then recut it! We did improve though, this time we discoverred our mistake before the wing was glued together with sheer web on the bench waiting for spar cover, this time we could just reset the templet to the position clearly marked on the plans and recut, the last time we had to make a 4 foot dril from electrical conduit and hand drill it through the foam. This weekend the last glue together of wing cores!!!!!!!!!!! Mike

I know you have made your mind up, but, I can't help thinking about it, too many pilots die from fuel starvation. if you switch to larger diameter tubing and a double throw valve, you now have a lower presure system and no pilot workload! You don't like having high preasure tubing in the cockpit, well it is there, I only suggest doubling it. If it bothers you, just safty it with an extra safty cover over the fuel lines. I think the double throw vales you will find that are made for this are set up for the larger diameter tubing, the beech tubing is larger. You may even find a used beech or cesna valve at an unreasonable price. Mike

The method of cowling fabrication, not DD cooling Tanka youa Mike

well, will you tell us about it???

I thought a NACA scoop obtained very close to ram scoop flow with almost no drag

SOLD, we are at that stage now and will only have to repair 1 wing for the hinge cutouts

I like 3/4 birch plywood for forms and jigs and I would prefer to use this for the turtledeck form ( we do use all of them twice and have passed many along to other builders/wanna be builders.) Does anyone see a problem using 3/4 instead of 3/8'ths, I do have a 7 or so degree shaper bit that I could angle them all a little amount with?

my brother-in-law has made an awful lot of the parts using a drill press, small belt/disk sander (1"belt/8"disk), sheet metal brake (his is for siding so it can only be used on very thin items, small band saw with bimetal blade and tig weldor, oh yeh, and allot of simple hand tools (files, hack saw, cheep import crosslide table for drill press, punches, drills, reems its) and that blue layout stuff and double sided tape for making multiple identicle duplicates. He likes to work in metal. I don't know if arc is approved for aviation, I think tig and gas welding are. It's amazing what these simple tools can produce.

Do you weld???

I'v done all of the cutting for two planes (except the verticle stabilizers) and the plans model works just fine - you learn how to use it making the straight cuts (where lag is a non issue) in that phase of the cutting you will learn the voltage settings and the pace that is appropiate. After each "Money cut", a curved cut of a flying surface, you just take a moment to retension and off you go to the races. If the blocks didn't need to be squared off in the beginning, an improvement might be necessary, but it just isn't. And BTW hot wire cutting is EASY - it is not to be feared, thousands have done it with no experience and obtained excellant results. The canard is first and it is not taperred like the wings and is easier than the wings. The wings are taperred and are a little harder, but not to worry, you will do it just fine. For the canard 2 people is fine for the wings, a third is advisable for temp setting and cutoff catching!! The plans are laid out in a teaching/learning order, simple parts in the beginning, with more complex ones as you go. By the time you need more skills - whallah, you now have them. My advice is to start and not read ahead, reading ahead is scarry, just do each sentence at a time and just worry about the current sentence, once you complete a sentence go on to the next one. I would occassionally read ahead and it would scare me, all for naught, you just worry about what you are working on and having three months of supplies on hand at any given time. Some of the suppliers are small and do limited production runs, don't call for the landing strut and figure it will be shipped immediatly, buy three months ahead and guess big on progress so that you don't run out, this stuff has a great shelf life, an extra 2 or 6 months on the shelf won't hurt it, but waiting 6 weeks for a little or big part will frustrate you. Mike

I have two hobbies and dust is what I make. If you were asking about furniture building, I would say - DONT DO IT IN THE BASEMENT!!!! But Glass work ins't that bad, thats not to say you don't create dust, just not in the quantities that you do in woodworking, untill you start filling and sanding. Filling and sanding is left until the end and you can find other quarters for that operation. Most of the dust in the building process is heavy enough to settly locally for vacuuming and sweeping, it's not the insidiouse kind that floats to every nook and cranney from floor to ceiling, like wood sanding dust, in the construction phase. Mike chap 19 see my post on getting started

We got started by sheer dumb luck. My brother-in-law,dave, and I reviewed the drool pages of the annual kitplanes availability issue, previous to the current multi issue format, and we both independantly fell in love with the looks and performance quoted for the cozy. When you start looking for 200+, 4 passenger planes the 500 vapor/real planes dwindle down quite fast. Fortunatly there were no vapor 4+ canards available at the time and we didn't get stuck with a non supplier. After owning the plans for a few months or so Dave bought a set and then I too looked into improving materials. I spent hours on the phone, bought books and read the newsletters, until I realized that changing the materials is a stupid idea (re-engineering the plane is not a project for someone who wants to ever finish the plane and the "new" materials were not any stronger (carbon fiber has to be laid up perfect to gain it's extra strength) and costs allot more. I also realized that my search was basically one to not start me building instead of one that would start me building. Well, I have a garage that is stuffed with woodworking tools and Dave's garage is HUGE and would be dificult to heat or cool, we do like our comfort, so we decided to build in dave's non walk out basement. it will just require a hole in the family room floor to extricate the plane parts. Similar to what you do when building a stairwell, except - no stairs and we nail the floor back down when fully extracated. Everyone is making a big deal about this, but it is really no big deal and i think that daves wife's viewers that she is selling tickets to may be upset at the simpleness of it all. That was four years ago, the party began, more on that in a later post. The basement is well lite, heated, air conditioned and big. The only change we have had to make in the build schedule is not attaching the main spars or the wings yet and we will build the turtleback and canopy and attach to fus befor removal from basement. We have a a general workbench 2x20 a layup bench 4x10 and a cutting table 4x8 2 tubs, 2 canards,two landing gears, and three wings. We are also slowly stealing storage space on dave's wife side/previous side of the basement. enough for now Mike

cmon down - free room and board and slave wages Mike

Talked with my buddy today and he highly recommended a 1 lever valve system. Cesna has one that will change both the feeds and the returns at once. He also said to be sure to return the fuel to the top of the tank. He has many stories and related this one, i'll not say the name of the airplane, but it was a major mfg, had planes falling out of the sky, and didn't know why and didn't believe it could be the fuel system. Well a factory rep took the plane from the factory and the engine stopped a certain amount away on his journey. He then went back to the factory and got another plane and took the same route and the same thing happened! This got the attention of the mfg and they began to look into it. No problems could be found with the planes or there systems. They then took a stripped down version , no interior panels, and clear plastic tubing for all fuel lines and returns and took off, well, at 9500 feet (the same altitude that the other planes had the problem, bubbles started forming in the return lines and stopped the flow back to the tanks and stopped the engine from getting fuel. This required two changes - increasing the lines to 5/16 (another airplane mfg went to 3/8) and putting the tube to the top of the tank! Mike

we use all slow and keep multiple items going so that the cure time doesn't matter. for example last saturday we laid bottom skin on wing 3 laid up aileron pocket on wing 2 cut off top of nose on fus 2 (this one got behind and we are slowly catching it up. fabricated parts for hidden belhorn this saturday (time permitting) we will put spar cap on top of wing 3 install antennas and rudder conduit wing 3 sand aileron for attaching counterweignt sand aileron wing 2 and top/bottom/sides for fit cut extra for hinges wing 2 glass inside of fus nose top repair inside nose of fus 1 where we accidentially cut between glass and bulkhead(oops) sand balast compartment fus 1 and glass install pitot on fus 1 see - always plenty to do and we never run out of time for layup or lose any epoxy to exotherm

some days I'm a little slow - so you just need to switch the return to the incoming tank, not to be able to turn it off? Mike

Suggested solutions 1. Andair duplex valve on the firewall with remote switching. Pros - High quality part. Simple operation. Cons - Price. Remote selector. I wouldn't want a remote selector - denver effect 2. Draw always from tank A. facet tank transfer pump to regulate fuel levels, a la Tracy Crook. Pros - Inexpensive Cons - Pilot workload Good way to run out of fuel on short final 3. A second weatherhead valve on the seatback for the returns. Pros - Inexpensive Cons - lots of pipes in the cabin. Why do you need a valve on the returns?? 4. A motorized soleniod on the firewall. Duplex valves are available, but with plastic fittings Pros - inexpensive cons - Plastic fittings 5. Go with a sump tank a la Velocity. Pros - proven Cons - proven to be a nuisance with irregular feeds. Header tank in the cockpit. cons says it all A good friend of mine was an aircraft accident investigator for 25 years, He rarely, I mean rarely investigated fires, but he often investigated fuel starvation from lack of fuel from tank being used!!! He thinks the fuel shutoff valve that the FAA requires kills many many people. He is also a 7,000 hour pilot, a&p,DAR etc etc

i'm 6'3 and was fine in a standard cozy without the allowable 1" canopy raising - Moving the seat back will change allot of dimensions and require constant recalculation Also - thinning the seats with temper foam sandwich will still provide comfy deats Mike

I gota tell you, wing building is like magic. You follow these instructions, including making all of these crazy looking cuts (tapperd polygons, in the inside of the wing and later, much later (after many, many layups for sheer webs/spar caps/covering). You make these cuts along the top and bottom of the wing - and they are not in the same place and whalla!!! a friez aileron pops out Keep building - it starts to get funner as you go Mike