dpaton

That would be a rhino rudder, which is what the Long-EZ was originally designed with. The first Long also had significantly more sweep in the wings, and looked like an enlarged VariEZE. The changes Burt Rutan made before he released plans to the homebuilding community included rudders on the winglets and a completely new wing which fixed all of the poor handling characteristics of the plane. If it's large enough, or if you make it fully pivoting instead of a control surface on a vertical stab. I think it'll be fine. -dave

Maybe, maybe not. The stock Long is about 17" wide at the hips, and 22" at the shoulders, give or take a little. Figure 41" or more for seat-to-pedal length. The Cozy mkIV is 16, 39 (total), and 39.5 respectively, according to what I found online. The Long does have more restrictive leg holes than the Cozy mkIV...the left leg hole is a hare over 7.5" wide, the right one is about 6.5", both are around 9.25 tall. The CozyIV uses a single large hole for both legs (one for each person), though I don't know the dimensions. I'm not sure what kind of leg room the original Cozy has, but I know it's less than either the mkIV or the LongEZ. -dave

Your height shouldn't be a problem...as I recall, the designer (Burt Rutan) was a fellow in our height range (I'm 6'4"). Width may be an issue, depending on your build. Was the Cozy you sat in an original or a mkIV? The original is extremely cramped for big people, as it's more like a LongEZ and a half wide for 2 seats. The mkIV is wider and much more reasonable for 2 across. -dave

The short answer is no. Ceramic describes a radically diverse class of materials, and the ones used as paint pigments are manufactured in a very different way than your insulation material. They may have a teeny amount of insulation ability, but it's effectively useless for your purposes. -dave

Holy cow that sounds like a lot of weight. 3-4 coats of finish paint? That could easily be over 100lbs of extra stuff on your bird, and VERY hard to offset. You still need to do the proof of concept test...build up a square yard of wing-like sandwich, thick foam, etc, with something like a spar cap layup underneath the skin, embed some thermocouples in strategic locations, and leave it outside, 4' above an asphalt (black) driveway on a hot day (90-100F air temp) without wind, to simulate worst case heat soak. A datalogged graph of the temperatures would be most valuable to calculate what those temperatures will do to the layups. Working from there, once the data is taken, should be relatively simple. The line about the ceramic tiles on the shuttle sounds a little optimistic to me. The tiles, as I recall, are so soft as to be destroyed if you bump into them very hard. Their insulating ability comes from their low density, and the high amount of termal isolation that provides. Aerogel insulators work on the same principle. I wonder about the durability of the ceramic spheres...will the ones on the strakes get smashed and deformed when someone hops up there to get in? What about the 50th time? A black composite plane still sounds like a really bad idea to me. Really bad. But if you can make this work, it'll be really astounding. -dave

As far as I know, the changes in the 8.x flight modeling will require some heavy changes to the canards that are currently available. At one point Curt was working on an update for his VariEZE model, but I haven't heard from him in a while. There's a forum over on x-plane.org where you can add a me-too to plane requests. I'd start there. -dave

Yup. And paint, and brake lines, and seat cushions, and the metal parts from the girrrls, and.... You can see why I expect my build to take a lot more than 3 years And if it comes down to it, don't build an EZ because it's cheaper, build it because you love it more than a Cozy. -dave

Correction Raky, my numbers are a few years old. A few things I noticed when I was on the Wicks site this morning...the Cozy kits come with a lot more stuff than the EZ kit, things that you'll need to buy for either type of EZ: COZY4 ELECTRICAL CZ4-CHPT-22 $896.40 CZ4 ENGINE PROP CZ4-CHPT-23 $925.20 COZY4 COVERS FAIRING CZ4-CHPT-24 $160.06 COZY4 FINISHING KIT CZ4-CHPT-25 $844.70 SUPPLIES & TOOLS CZ4-TOOLS $367.5 COZYGIRRLS TOOLS COZYGIRRRL-TOOLS $643.49Note that you shouldn't buy the Cozy fairings or prop for an EZ variant. Someone always asks... You can plan on adding a similar amount (nearly $3K) to the cost of an OpenEZ, bringing it to around $8K, give or take (shipping, tax, etc). Again, epoxy isn't included in this. Also, the electrical kit isn't really complete. It has the starter and master solenoids, strobes, strobe driver, and some wire. No breaker panel, no distro block, etc. -dave

The LEZ kits contain the physical materials to build the structure of the plane, minus epoxy. You'll end up spending more than $4700 to build the airframe, mainly due to the cost of epoxy, fixturing, etc. It probably won't be as much as a Cozy, but it's not as cheap as it seems. Based on some pricing I dug up about a year ago, it'd be closer to $6k to get the fuselage complete. Add a lot more for engine, instruments, paint, filler, brakes, control systems, etc. My $0.02.

The thought has crossed my mind too. I'd basically build the rollover structure per the plans, but make it a little bit larger, complete with the carbon roving, and call it good. Of course, that's only assuming I'm patient enough to add that extra time to my build. As for that uncleanable canopy bit, Mike noted in the directions that he put a thin rubber seal between the rollover structure and the canopy to keep it from rattling. I'm guessing that would keep it relatively clean too. -dave

Oops, I lied. The landing brake isn't in the original plans at all. It may be on the CDs, but I forgot to check last night before I went to bed, and I didn't bring the discs with me to work today. Something to take care of later I suppose. I plan on building with all of those things included, but acquiring them may be harder these days. The last time I checked with RAF about their stock, they were very low on everything, and in the 3 months since then, they've been sold out of the Roncz plans for a while, which makes me wonder what's left. One of the other things we MUST add to the list is the rollover mod. I'd consider this a mandatory addition to any OpenEZ or Long-EZ, strictly as a safety item. The documents are located here: Article Roll over documents Drawings Plan All are in PDF format, and the links go direct to RAF. -dave

All of those extra mod plans are, as I recall, on the TERF CD. I'll check later. The ailerons improve control and just plane look cooler, the flush belhorns clean up the outside of the winglets, and the 0-235...well..does anyone build an EZ and put a 235 in it any more? -dave

I heard a nasty rumor that the cost to peek under the ultra-slick cowl of Klaus' Vari (and it's associated super low drag cooling system) was a firstborn son, indentured servitude sanding parts, and a left...er...leg, I doubt he'll let anyone short of Burt himself in on the details of his new wings. Of course, being a nasty rumor, it might not be true. -dave

The plans and manuals are available on the TERF CD set. It's available from TERF, and costs USD$295 plus shipping. There are no pages missing from the templates that I'm aware of. -dave

Thanks for the Lancair backup Wayne. Good to know. So, all, have we successfully put this one to rest yet? Homebuilt composite planes should all be light colors on top. Agreed? -dave

Indeed. I've spent a few minutes breathing through one of the full-face devices that you're required to use above 18k, and they aren't much fun unless you have a helmet to hold them to, and even then they aren't particularly natural to use. The chance that you could lose O2 at altitude with one of those systems, assuming it's installed correctly, is small, but finite, and if it does, it can be fatal. Hypoxemia will set in in a matter of minutes, rendering you useless as PIC. That's be bad I think. Pressureizing a Cozy would require a comlpetely different, and much heavier, fuselage to contain the pressure differential without leaks. Somone on the other board tossed it around a little, and after it was shot thouroghly full of holes from a weight and structural standpoint, it was abandoned. -dave

dhaulk- The real question is if it can maintain a potentialy 100F temperature gradient across it's application thickness for an entire day. I have my doubts about that, especially since it would need to be completely rigid ceramic to achieve that kind of isolation over time, and your plane is flexible. You'd need to know a lot more about the material and its mechanical and thermodynamic properties before it'd enter into the realm of fesable. I think everyone here will agree that it's a much better idea to paint the top of your bird white. Karolina- I know better than that. I should have couched that link with my own views on it: The ruler example is not good engineering, I agree, but the gist of the article is that by changing the plane from something flexible to something rigid, without the required engineering knowledge, will make it weaker and potentially less safe. There are too many interdependentcies in these planes to make radical changes to the structure (carbon fiber applied randomly) or construction (honeycomb) without following through with careful engineering analysis and risk assessment first. There is apparently a safe envelope we can modify our planes within, but things like that put us far outside that envelope, and invite disaster. -dave

You could probably make the ceramic stuff work, but you'd end up applying so much of it you'd make your plane heeeeeeeavy. Weight for these kinds of planes is the enemy. Make it only as heavy as is required...anything else compromises strength, range, and performance. Remember, there's more than 25 years of experimentation and mistakes for the Rutan derrived canard designs. There's a reason people build them the way they do. Small changes (longer noses, widened, lengthened, retracts, big engines, etc) sure, but radical departures in the structure and finish are discouraged by history and common sense. I'd suggest you read this article before thinking about changing the structure of a plane that much. UV is blocked nicely by modern finishes...no special tricks needed for that. -dave

Two short answers- Honeycomb for a Cozy requires such a significant departure from the plans I'd STRONGLY discourage it, and yes, I've done a little honeycomb work. It's hard to get right. Very hard. Stay away from dark colors unless you hanger your plane and only ever fly at night, honeycomb or not. It's the epoxy that matters too, and without a giant autoclave and industrial epoxies and processes, you won't change the temperature limits. Building a Cozy isn't hard. Major mods like that are. My $0.02. -dave

Turbo-normalized has been done I believe. I know it's well understood, and it isn't rocket science to put something like that in an EZ. Pressurized is a whole different ballgame, and would require a ground-up redesign of the fuselage. The undertaking would be mammoth, and with the pressures involved, could be fatal if anything was done incorrectly that could cause depressurization at altitude, or structural failure. For grins, take a look at the way the Lancair IV-P is made, vs our little plastic birds. Yeah, it's that different. My $0.02? Stick with the known quantities, like heated socks and O2 cannulas, unless you're willing to design what amounts to a new plane. -dave

Since the main eracer.org page seems to indicate that the site is more or less shut down, I think it's safe to assume that any information behind it, like Dorothy's page, are out of date. I'm sure that someone at OSH will have a booth out though -dave

Indeed. My $0.02: It's their legal prerogative to take their bat and ball and go home, but in this country, you're still (relatively) free to build a machine that will probably kill you when you try and fly it, and the builder is well within his or her rights to do so against the wishes of the manufacturer, unless there's some kind of legal agreement to the contrary which is actually enforcable. Unfortunately, trying to push the EAA and FAA into policing the way people build planes from plans is a wonderful way to alienate the US market. Their loss... Me? I'm building a SuperOpenDaveTZ. -dave

I sure hope so. I've got both, and I'm not even 30 yet. Anything that will get me my PPL sooner though, is an asset -dave

In my dad's case it was indeed eyesight related. All sorts of diseases and medical conditions can cause the medical to be pulled, as well as certain medications. This site will tell you all you need to know. -dave

Indeed I am. I'll be driving up Thursday night and heading back home on Sunday. I'm hoping that the Cozy forum will be late enough in the week that I can make it, and I plan to stop by and see as many Canardians as possible this year. I'm dragging my dad along this year, mostly for nostalgia, since we went religiously from 88 to 97, when he was flying, and then never more after he lost his medical. He's as pumped as I am. We're staying in town, just over the river. I got the last room in town, literally. I called every single hotel within 30 miles, and I got the last room at the last dive with beds and showers. -dave