emteeoh

ACS has a canadian office, near YYZ (just off the 401 at Dixon), so you might be able to avoid shipping charges altogether.

Hey Waiter: I've always wondered about the servos in FBW: how do you make them redundant? If one freezes up, then aren't you just eating up battery as 2 servos fight with the frozen one? To over come that, you need some sort of clutch, I guess, but I'm no mechanical engineer, I can't picture it.

Like I said, I have grave doubts about the business model at a price of $194K. For that much money, I can buy my COZY MKIV, buy a bunch of $5K cars, leave one at each of the 20 most common airports that I fly to, and have a bunch of $$$ left over. Get there faster, with a lot more flexibility. Hope I'm wrong, though - it would be cool if they succeeded.

- rather than buy 20 $5K cars, you could get a zipcar membership, although zipcar will probably need to expand their service areas. I suspect that will happen in the long run, anyhow.

- I doubt that building an airplane is likely to be a solution that will be popular with the general public. The moment you start comparing to new certified planes, 194k doesn't sound too bad, unfortunately.

Well, rather than changing the canard's angle or airfoil, you could slide it forward. As long as you have enough control authority, I think that'll do it. (I'll sit silent on the cons to this. I know I've seen a dissertation on it written by Marc somewhere in these forums, but I'm too lazy to look for it right now.)

However, you might want to read http://www.ezchronicles.com/?p=33:

But several years ago an actual event established the truth. You have all read about the incident right? If I remember correctly, a North Carolina VariEze was making a 200 mph-ish low pass, felt a jolt and power loss, and landed on a parallel runway.

Wondering what the heck, the pilot got out and saw dangling wires in back and fluid on the ground. He put the nose on the ground and walked back and was astonished to find that there was no lower cowl - and no engine. A crash crew pickup pulled up with the engine in the bed. I remember him attributing the engine being pulled off by a failed male inlet and lower cowl. Must have been especially interesting for the first time flyer in the back seat.

 

Interestingly, he stated that control response during the landing gave little or no indication that the engine had departed the aircraft. Others claiming experience in this arena seem to agree. So what about the unrecoverable nose down dive? Obviously the nose is being held up by trading off speed. There are evidently some areas of GU canard operation that haven’t been fully documented. And the area of interest here looks like one of them.

 

Losing your *ENTIRE* engine is not the same as adding flaps to your main wing, but it does suggest that the canard might have a little more control authority than we intuitively expect. I should emphasize "might" because you need to remember that the plural of "anecdote" is not "fact", and that's what this story is: a bunch of anecdotes. Also, its about VE's, not cozy's. That means its different but the same, probably.

.

The huge majority of guys just LOOKING at the airplane and dreaming, DONT build it...but they are the guys who post the most.

I resemble that remark.

I haven't built anything myself, but it *sounds* like you can build in the space of 1 car, up until about the time you want to build the strakes.

I know the feeling about waiting to build. We've got a kid coming, due halloween, and I'm sure I'll be totally sleep deprived for at least 6 weeks, so I'm hoping to start building my OpenEZ in January.

What part of Tranna are you hoping to move to?

*edit*

As I recall, Mark Z built his in his basement, so the criteria could be as little as a suitably large basement door or window. The building season in ontario is a little short if the space is unheated (The foam should be over 18C IIRC) so an unfinished basement might be better than a garage anyhow.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/27997120@N05/2719067931/

kinda neat, VERY ugly! They totally ruined all the lines on the fuselage, IMO.

Hi to all

 

i live in greece, although live far i am a big fun of Burt Rutan and i love the long ez.

i spend the past 3 years wondering of which aircraft should i replacate for the construction of my homebuilt simulator.

i choose that aircraft to be the long ez cause i though i could find plands and drawings easily but i couldnt find all that i need to construct just the cockpit and half the nose and i need a prortion or all the plans of the ez. if i posted the thread to the wrong sub forum please tell me.

 

my e-mail:

jim86gr@hotmail.com

I think you're in the right place. You want 2 things:

1) Get the TERF CD. http://www.dragonaero.com/RAFCDROM.htm . In there is a file named lezplan.pdf: its the one you want.

2) download the OpenEZ templates. http://www.canardzone.com/content/Open-EZDrawingsRev5.zip

Tada! Thats all you need to build a plane. (except, of course, time, materials, skill, patience, etc)

with Cozy motor mounts.

Why? Is that just an availability thing? Or are cozy motor mounts different (and presumably better) somehow?

From another thread

( I would say you really need EI to go high, unpressurized Mags start missfiring as you increase altitude. I have had mags (bendix) do OK at FL180, but the current mag I hav starts missfiring at FL150 and is completely dead by the time I get to FL180)

 

I don't get that. Magnetos are basically a magnet, a turning coil, and a cam-operated switch. How would altitude and atmospheric pressure figure into their operation?

heheh. As I recall, the EZ plans say to shape the nose "until it looks like a nose"(I'm sure I read something to that effect somewhere). I wonder if that sort of thing happens with Scaled's more recent planes too?

Do you mean there are hidden rudder plans not produced by RAF out there on the intarwebs somewhere?

Is it just me, or does anyone else look at Spaceship Two and think in terms of a LongEZ build? Ooh! They're close to closing off the strakes! http://bp0.blogger.com/_nP0yUQFiTwU/SHE6UzDOqVI/AAAAAAAAAf0/UzitMttE6Jc/s1600-h/SpaceShipTwo_Construction_wing_assembly-8.jpg

(from Mojave Skies, http://mojaveskies.blogspot.com/)

edit: the embedded image didn't seem to want to work, so I changed it to a URL...

Ya know, I'm sure this will look pretty cool from the outside, but I wonder how good it will look from the back seat...

hmmm. I was taught as a kid that splices were *STONGER* than the original rope, when properly done. Wikipedia says that its 5 to 15% weaker. Ya learn something new every day around here.

That's an eye-splice on that rope, which should be very strong. Did it break where the splice ended?

In light of Jack's current adventures, I thought I'd point out an article on fire suppression in the latest issue of kitplane magazine.

http://www.kitplanes.com/issues/25_8/exploring/issues_exploring_8318-1.phtml

I think you need to be a subscriber to read it for the moment, and it hasn't hit the shelves in stores yet, but it will soon.

The TERF CD definitely contains plans. The title page says "Variviggen Plans, Second Edition, Jan 79"

I took a tour of their factory in February... I don't recall specifics of what was built with what, but I do recall being told that in some places, they used a fibre product that was sort of a glass rope, rather than the usual cloth. If I recall correctly, the spars were one place. I wish I could remember the name of the glass rope-like stuff for you. As I recall, they said they used it because it make it faster and cheaper to make those parts that way, it wasnt an appropriate technique for thin/short shapes, and I don't think he commented on if it made for a lighter,heavier,stronger or weaker product. (I wish I'd thought to ask at time, but I'd guess its strength neutral or stronger, but heavier)

Well, I'm getting a little closer to not being a non-pilot builder.... I had my first solo yesterday evening. Wow! It really was just like lessons, except a little more relaxing than lessons (nobody looking over my shoulder).

 

My last solo landing was really fun... it was getting dark, and I keyed the mic three times for the runway lights. Wow, landing like that, solo, I'll never forget it.

 

Congratulations!

The more I think about position, the more I would like to consider prone seating like on a crotch rocket or a hang glider. This thought is not passing by so easily.

A friend of mine once announced that he wanted to get a crotch rocket. His brother (a long time rider) took him to a local bike shop, and just walked around the collection of used bikes for sale, pointing out what he called "ball prints" on the gas tanks.

Quite simply, in no way do I *EVER* want to leave ball prints on my airplane.

Nope. Velocity has made it clear that they intend to sell more kits.

ummm... As far as I know (and I'm no expert!) you can just sand it all off. But would you want to? If the builder didn't take the time to make the plane look and feel smooth before painting it... What other corners did he cut?

Is that a rotary engine with more moving parts? That's what it looks like to me.

Jon Matcho said:

Great feedback.

That's how open source generally works, but generally comes to a "benevolent dictator" for the final word (ex. Linus Torvalds for Linux). Without that I think the voting scheme is good.

The thing is that the "benevolent dictator" is self-appointed, and usually the guy who started the project. In this case, that would be you!

Quote

Anyone ever hear of SharePoint? I customize SharePoint full-time as part of my day job. I have been fixing to setup a SharePoint site for these activities some time now. Web-based access, check-in/out, simple wikis, etc. Let me see about setting it up ASAP to bring some order to this, but we are on the right track.

yeah, we use sharepoint here too. I'm not a huge fan, but that's because I can be a little bit of a luddite when it comes to the web. HTML1.0 ought to be good enough, IMO. Also... Microsoft. 'nuff said.

In this case, I would just like to suggest we keep it clean of embrace-and-extend-isms enough that it works with non-IE browsers and non MS office tools . You've done a fine job of that on canardzone so far, so I'm not particularly worried.