dpaton

Is there any info on the Honda PSRUs online? I couldn't find it, but since I have a couple of VTEC motors kicking around....

After finishing a week of design FMEAs at work, that sent shivers down my spine , but they're good questions to ask. From the look of it, the system seems pretty robust. It's kind of like the Velocity system, but simpler and lighter. Occam's Razor say it should be better...is it really?

On a Long, I think the common thing to do is to pick up the nose and drag it, or build a dolly with a nice spot to put the nose into so you can push it around while it's grazing. The Long/Vari nose gear isn't all that strong, and I wouldn't dream of attaching a tow bar to it. My $0.02.

Dad and I won't be making it this year..my honeymoon on October is sucking up every ounce of vacation I have this year, and the wedding is sucking up all the travel money. Next year it's on though

Jim's (RST) antennas are just fine. Pay a couple of bucks, and life will be good. :-)

I've got the NOS poster framed in the den at home. It's a little yellow around the edges, because it was in the warehouse so long, but it's still cool.

New engine, fuselage, spar, canard, wing, canopy....um...you'll probably want new landing gear and instruments too. Does that cover it?

Phil, I hate to tell you this, but you may end up with worse problems. I had the same symptoms 12 years ago. A year later I was in full-on bunny suit terratory. Epoxy sensitivity isn't something to be taken lightly. Ask the Cozy Girrls too...IIRC, one of them has the same problem I do, though not quite to my extreme. Hopefully if you nip this in the bud early you won't end up like me First thing's first, take a break. Give your body a week or three off from the dust and the fumes. Then do like Jon said and make sure you have LOTS of ventilation when you're working. Leave as many doors and windows open as you can, get plenty of fresh air, and try not to breathe when your face is over the pot of goo. Also give a look to the forced air dust systems. They blow filtered air inside the mask, and actually help keep you cool. I sweat profusely in my twin-can respirator too, but the forced air mask is a dream. Plus, it's a full face mask, so my glasses never fog, thanks to the moving air. The fumes are actually worse for you than direct contact, as the chemicals are absorbed MUCH faster, and much more completely, through the mucous membranes in your lungs than they are through your much less porous skin. -dave

I hate to nit pick, but there's always a dielectric effect, even with air. Properly installed, Bill's antennas should work like a dream. They're just designed with a little less tolerance for slop than the RST system. To each their own.

The toroids are a TUNING element. They are lossy on purpose, as they help to get the antenna resonant around the frequencies of interest, and not at the ones of disinterest. If you have a perfectly cut antenna, you don't need the toroids, I agree. The odds of that happening in a canard are about a zillion to one. The density, construction, and chemistry of the substrate (glass/foam/etc) has a lot to do with the RF behavior of the antenna. The coax feeding the antenna has a lot to do with it. The humidity even has a measurable effect. The toroids that Jim puts in the RST kit give some cushion to the design, making it more friendly to the radio and generally more reliable from an installation standpoint. I haven't tested them back to back, but I'd bet that Jim's kit is a little more friendly from an RF perspective too. It might not be the bleeding edge of performance, but as a builder and an EE, I'll take the small compromise of the toroids in favor of the increased chance of reliability (RF-system-wise).

I'm an electrical engineer for a little product development firm outside Chicago. During the day I design circuits, PC boards, user interfaces, write software, solder, run a mill, talk with clients...anything to keep the business moving. Some day I'll turn they money they pay me to play at work into a Cozy. -dave

Even if you're just looking around and haven't decided to commit yet, he's still THE MAN to talk to. He's probably forgotten more about a lot of these birds than their owners can remember. His database of planes, pilots, mods, success and failures, projects, references, inspectors, and clubs is overwhelming. The price for his knowledge is small considering the lengths he goes to make sure you match your project. His service to the canard community at large is indispensable.

Sounds like a good plan. Of course, knowing my luck, by the time I make it to midlife crisis time there will be something newer and better and faster and cleaner and and and and... :D -dave, still basking in the warmth of a recent quarterlife crisis

I know your pain....I recently gave up the idea of an EZ in favor of a Cozy IV. The GIB who will likely be around for the rest of my life can't do tandem, and family considerations will be very real by the time I finish the plane (haven't even started yet) so the choice was made, but after 20 years of dreaming about a Long-EZ, it was a tough one.

Honestly, there are hundreds and hundreds of these planes that are flying safely that were built from the wonky templates. There's enough of a fudge factor built in that the errors aren't a big problem. I'm extrememly anal about these things though, so I'm trying to make it just perfect, which is something of a herculean task. You don't have to wait for the templates to be perfect. Go ahead and get the CDs and clean the garage and start building. Your plane will be fine. :)

I beg to differ. The import/export processs between CAD packages (since we must deal with the fact that not everyone uses the same thing) can introduuce just as many, if not more, scaling errors than a PDF, and iss a thing more succeptaable to humaan error than not. A PDF is a static document, allowing no adjustment without explicit scaling. It is tied to both a paper size and bitmap raster content, and given anything but the most byzantine print drivers or invasive print operator, will always come out the same size every time, given the same paper size in the print device. If we all had access to architectural print shops that can push a DXF out to a DesignJet with 0.05% scaling acuracy I'd be all for it, but since most folks only have a local Kinkos, PDF is the most reliable option. Bitmap images like are used in the exiisting OpenEZ templates are exported as such, not as CAD vector data (DXF/true PostScript) As for the template scaling errors, it's something I'm working on. Check a few posts back. There are larger errors than those in some templates. I'm trying to track down a set that doesn't have them so we can update ours and be closer to accurate.

I freely admit that I'm being anal about it, but when I did the initial fit of the templates in my computer, I was off by close to 0.5" in some places. I'll tolerate 1/6-1/8" here and there, but 1/4" is bad and 1/2" is unacceptable to me. The out of roundness of some of the gauges on the IP and some skewing of the firewall templates really spooked me badly, in that such things, if present elsewhere, would build a plane that would never be straight. Yes, it may be a bit obsessive, but I want to make sure that anything I contribute is as close to infallible as possible, since it'll be more than just my butt riding on it.

I only have one data point right now, and I couldn't secure the sheets I saw for scanning, but I did hold in my hands a set of assembled original templates that had no distortion whatsoever. Every single line on every single sheet lined up perfectly, all circles were circles, and the quick measurements I was able to do showed none of the compression and skewing on the existing OpenEZ drawings. I'm working very hard to get those drawings back into my hands, and I'm following leads on another set reputed to be in equally good condition. I was very surprised when I saw them, as I was under the impression that all copies were the same. I was rather excited as well, as perfect drawings will allow the computerized tracing of the templates, getting us close to our goal of a CADd OpenEZ. I'm quite certain that there were multiple printings of the EZ drawings over the years, and that the masters did not have the distortion present in the existing electronic files. The real mystery is what happened to create the two branches of the templates? -dave

I'm collecting my pennies, but more than likely they'll end up paying for Cozy plans now instead of OpenEZ parts. Part of it is practical...going cross country with 2 people in an EZ, you have less baggage capacity than in a Cozy, but most of it is that my GIB hates tandem flight, she gets terribly airsick back there. Side by side it's no problem at all, even in unusual attitudes. Neither of us can explain it, but that's the way it is. Yes, the EZ is a more efficient cruiser, but if I can't cruise with my passenger, then what's the point? I'm still working (slowly) on getting the templates unified, but I'm somewhat hampered right now. It's come to my attention that the ones that we have may be less than perfect, and there may be better examples out there. I'm working to get those examples into my hands for comparision and review, to make sure the stuff I produce is as good as it can be. Updates as they happen. -dave

When I spoke with Chrissi at Rough River, she said she was working on a new and improved LEZ engine mount. It's entirely possible that they're just swamped right now...give them time, I know they want to support the Long-EZ folks too. -dave

In short, it needs to be a Berkut. Different wing and canard construction (pulled from a mold, vacuum formed, oven cured), materials (carbon fiber), and airfoils (whatever Dave Ronneburg used) would be a good way to start. -dave

I'm not an AeroE, but I do have a signifanct MechE background (behind my EE degree) and I'd be very wary about expanding the Vne of the Long or OpenEZ without some very stringent flight test requirements. There have been anecdotal reports over the years of some very high speed durability for the structure, but there has also been a disturbing report of a fatal crash caused by total structural failure due to catestrophic flutter, induced in a high speed dive. The similarity of the design of the Berkut to the Long starts and ends with the idea of it being a 2 place tandem canard. The airfoils are different, the fuse is different, the control surfaces are different, the wings are different, the canard is different, the construction method is RADICALLY different. All of that adds up to a completely different airframe. Comparing it to a Long is like comparing oranges to beachballs. Yes, they're both round, but that's about it. If you really want to, sure, put a turbo 320 in the back of a Long, keep it cool, and slowly expand your Vne envelope, but be aware that the airfoils are not designed to work well up there, they get inefficient at high speeds. Beware of mach tuck on the canard. Watch out for flutter. Wear a parachute and know how to bail out. Be safe. Taking a plane beyond it's design limits, however artifically safe they may have been made by the designer, is a highly dangerous proposition and must be approached with the same care as any potentially fatal endeavour. I'm not saying it's bad to go fast, just make sure it's done carefully.

Don't feel too bad. Until Oshkosh this year, I hadn't seen a canard in person in a DECADE. There's always next year.

Pictures are here: http://flickr.com/photos/mausball/sets/72157594310473912/ -dave

My memory is a little blurry, but here's what I can recall after n 8 hour car ride back: My dad and I got in Friday around 2pm (by car), to the sight of a mass of canards grazing on the tarmac at the airport. After a quick trip to the campsite to set up the tent and the EZup, we went back to the airport and started mingling. I spent most of Friday hanging around Steve Volvosek's beautiful EZ (N320ST) that he just finished (flew off the 40 and then out to RR, withg 52 hours on the Hobbs). His plane is really slick, and he was so giddy it was hard not to be infected with the joy of being a canardian. We had dinner at the lodge around 5 and crashed early, having gotten up at 0300 to drive down. It drizzled a little on Friday night, but nothing very serious or very long, just enough to oleave some drops on the tent when we woke up on Saturday morning. Showers at the campsite were really nice, one of the best equipped state parks I've ever been at. Morning was cold, but breakfast at the lodge was hot and we moseyed out to the airport to find even more planes. My count was 67 at that point, with a few in the air (the official count ws 70 later in the day). Ran into a bunch of folks from the forums and oogled planes and talked with owners and had a blast. Nick U. did a demo of his hot-mold DIY stick grip technique, which was really neat. Someone brought a Fein tool and the replacement for the Dritz scissors, which were a real hit of a demo. Chrissi and Randi were all over the place, chatting and being really great people. James Redmon (of Berkut 13 fame), Steve Wright (with the Stagger-EZ), Chris Essylstein (Cozy 540), Bill Allen (the transatlantic EZ pilot), and a bunch of others I can't remember right now were a highlight, tirelessly answering questions fired in their directions. Wow, my first RR, the 20th RR, and I won a prize at the raffle (Thanks Chrissi & Randi!) Today was spent drying out the tent and EZup from the torrential rainstorms that moved in on Saturday (complete with ground strike lightning and thunder overhead), then getting back on the road for the drive home. Wow what a weekend! :D :D -dave