Arbiter

Hi Folks, Working on starting an OPEN EZ in the near future and after searching high and low on this site and the internet I couldn't get a good feel for what can be expected for a useful load on the Long EZ. I saw 550 lbs somewhere, but it seems low to me given the 52 gallon capacity which is ~300LB already... Could people shout out their useful load experiences (There should be a spread given people's different configurations, but should produce an average). I looked all over this site and did not see this posted somewhere so I'd appreciate a shout out! Thanks! -Chris

The plan is to reproduce the templates in CAD so I can make a few modifications to the panel and mid-fuse bulkheads. It is FS40 to Tmann's earlier reply, my bad! I appreciate the measurements as well, they will help me determine what is going on in the drawing I made. I also made an interesting discovery while doing this process of conversion, I discovered the left and right leg and map holes are different sizes! This may seem trivial, but I honestly didn't notice this until I went through this process. Maybe others pick up things like that during the build (Which I am sure they do), but for me it's more about understanding the design. Also, it helps point out potential discrepancies between the templates and what turns out in reality. Maybe it is a moot point in the end of doing CAD drawings, but I don't have the $$ to start the build yet, and may not for a while, so I say why not dork around with it, learn PRO E better because of it, learn the pitfalls of conversion, and maybe in the end being able to have a more thorough understanding of the plans themselves. There is something to be said for building a 3D model and then going out and putting the pieces together myself when $$ is available... It's largely what we do in the engineering world anyway. Models, analysis, test .... Anywho, goodnight, and thanks for the measurement! -Chris

Hey Guys, I am beginning work on my own set of CAD templates in Pro E. I have had success with the FS48 lower IP panel template, and then when I moved on to the upper panel I ran into a descrepancy. on the template for FS40 upper I found the symbol BL 11.20 where the longerons intersect the IP. This is all well and good, except when I measured the lower panel and built it I read 11.125 from the centerline to the edge. It also looked like this panel was straight from the top to bottom on each side. Am I mistaken, and if so, which is the correct measurement? I am pretty confident I have all the correct dimensions, but not sure if there is a template in-consistency or if the panel is supposed to "bow" out towards the top somehow... I do not detect any bow with my eyes, but after messing with it all day now I can no longer see straight. Please help me out fellow CAD Canarders . Thanks! -Chris

Hey Fellow OpenEZ Builders! After about 4 or 5 months of debate and kicking around of which plans I would like to build, I have opted to build an OpenEZ and just purchased the TERF CD last night!!!! I am really excited to get the plans and start working with the templates! I want to thank EVERYONE who has contributed to the OpenEZ project and I hope we can continue to improve our sets of templates and builder experience base with this awesome aircraft! I do not think I will be able to start the project for some time, but if I can some-how I will! I have chosen the OpenEZ for a number of reasons: -The Legacy of performance that this aircraft has brought with it -Fighter like cockpit that fits snugly, but allows excellent visibility and comfort -2 seats instead of 4. This may seem counter-intuitive, but at Rough River I do not recall seeing anyone flying with more than 2 people. -Fuel Economy. This was the main reason for me over a Cozy MKIV because I felt I would be able to fly more often due to the lower cost per flight hour and still be able to take a friend with me for $100 Hamburger. This naturally assumes a smaller engine than the MkIV . -People have made thoughtful modifications and the design withstands them and becomes better and better because of them. Prudent possibilities are endless. I want to thank everyone I spoke to at Rough River who kicked me in the booty and said "GET BUILDING, BUY YOUR PLANS!". Some modifications I am hoping to make on the OpenEZ: -3-6 inches wider at panel and front seat bulkheads. This is actually to give me a bit more panel space with the added benefit of more "wiggle" room for my more portly frame. The Long I sat in at my local EAA chapter fit my bum perfectly, so what I want to do is use the added width to make the arm rests wider and maybe incorporate a map pocket or something if it does not interfere with the cables and such. -Look into making the aircraft a Limo EZ. I think I need the central states newsletters for that... If anyone can point me in the correct direction before I can complete the online search that would be cool and appreciated! -Berkut Canopy opening and roll-bar. I loved this fighter jet look and if I widen the aircraft I will need a custom canopy anywho! -Electric nosewheel lift -Possibly those cool removable strake baggage pods. The jury is still out on that! -I might try to make the cockpit longer to incorporate some baggage space, but I see this as a big mod and will need to do some engineering analysis on to determine the impact of lengthening. I have a few people I can likely use a good resources for this plus my own aero knowledge. -Incorporate the cool long nose I've seen! -Roncz Canard I think a number of these mods are pretty typical so hopefully there will be good resources out there! For the mods that are not typical I will need to do analysis to convince myself that they are OK and safe to do. Once again thank you all for your support so far! I may not have agreed with everything said to my questions, but I have thoughtfully considered all of your comments and I hope to join this community as a true builder soon! -Chris

That was what I was thinking of doing . I think it looks neat, now if only I could find the fuselage plans :-P.. -Chris

Well U don't have to build it :-P. I think it looks way more cool than a stock EZ, except the nose snout, but that can be corrected! Still looking for more info if anyone has it! *You will enjoy and bask in the glory of the Star Wars Long EZ* (Waves hand in really dorky display of star wars jedi mind-trickiness) -Chris

This is a very cool looking long! If I build an Open EZ I may decide to try and repeat these slick looks! The lofting looks fairly simple from the IP bulkhead on back. It looks like until the engine cowling the fuse is just widened a bit. Fwd and Aft of these locations look like they could be interesting to create molds for. Is there any chance this is owned by someone who would be able to talk about what they did for modifying the fuse? I worry a little about what structural changes need to be made and what calculations may be involved, but it doesn't look that much more different than a long EZ. I wonder if maybe it would be easier to "shrink" the Cozy IV to fit these lines... Ahh the wonder! Take care! Thanks! -Chris

Hi A1V8A2, welcome to the forum! Getting ahold of a jet engine is probably not easy, but certainly not impossible. I do not know your background with turbine engines, so let me put forth a few things one might consider when thinking of purchasing a turbine engine: 1. Consider the mission. I do not know if you want to build a Cozy or Long EZ with a jet engine in the back, but be mindful of why jet engines came about. Jet engines were designed to go high and fast, but burning a lot of fuel. By fast I mean 300+ MPH, which means that for the canard aircraft this forum discusses (Not counting the business and war aircraft) these speeds are not in their design envelope (What are the top speeds people have seen in safe level flight?). Modifying one of these for a jet engine has been done before, but I doubt the person's aircraft served the mission it was designed for (Range, cruising efficiency, etc..). If you don't care about that then read on , Jets are cool, and I wouldn't mind seeing more! 2. Consider the fuel burn. The J-85 you speak of burns 400 Gal/hr at TKO. Now lets say just for fun you somehow burn even 1/8 of that (I am really trying here), in a stock Cozy you'll have 52 gallons of fuel... That's not enough to fly for an hour with reserves. So you'd need to make the airframe heavier and draggier to get more fuel in (After you make the whole back seat fuel you'll want to put some pods in too or something. That leaves you with less weight to carry as passengers/baggage (This takes it back to how the original mission changes). 3. Consider the CG changes and how that will affect the airframe weight The J85 is longer than the Lycosaurus, and will thus put it's comparable weight of ~400-500 lbs installed farther aft. This will have an adverse affect on your CG limits and will require more weight be put up front to keep the airframe stable. This could be accomplished by lengthening the fuselage to get the passenger weights back up front (And add room for more fuel, so.... BONUS!) to help compensate more. If you go down this path I recommend talking to Chris Esselstyn who stretched his a foot or so. 4. Consider the maintenance required. I am not sure how the turbine world manages their maintenance for home-built turbine installations, but the rotating parts in these turbines are life limited to engine cycles, not hours. You need a way to know what the life is on each critical rotating part and have the maintenance capabilities to overhaul the engine once the number of cycles on a critical part expires (Cycles aren't necessarily the same as 1 flight either, especially if a lot of throttle excursions are incurred during a given flight). I've taken apart a CF34 down to a compressor top-case and it was a 3 day affair with 5 guys on it. Flanges weren't torqued or recently coming off a running engine (This was at training school) so i would imagine this time would go up significantly. Not to mention the parts cost, and you really don't want to risk leaving life limited hardware in there past its time, I know I would not fly in it unless I knew all the parts were significantly below the life limits and all the FAA recommended/mandated upgrades were put in. Bottom line = $$$$$$$$$$ Mucho Bucks. If all of this has you still wanting to put a roaring J85 into a canard aircraft, by all means I encourage you to go ahead and do it, I just want you fully informed (Or as much as I can help, others may chime in too if I left a lot of gaps) about how much different and how much more expensive a turbine installation is going to be if it's done right. As far as where to purchase one, I would check barnstormers, but again I'd be really careful that you understood and had DETAILED maintenance logs you trust on the engine you purchase. This was a failure I found on google images. You can see where the fan failed. There was a kevlar containment case there.... These people got really lucky. Good luck and if you do decide to put a jet engine in, let us know and keep us posted on the progress! -Chris

Adrian, You have definitely convinced me , It's more a matter of having a sole source that we could go to, but that's neither here nor there at this point. It sounds like you did what I was planning on doing with points and splines. I think I will probably digitize my own airfoil templates but I want to do that so I can compare differences between the Eppler 1230 and the modified one given for the plans. I plan to test them in a virtual wind tunnel (It's been a while, so I may be rusty with this stuff but I'll find out quickly!) and see how the different parameters are affected by the changes given, at least in a 2D sense. I don't necessarily want to use a different airfoil than the plans call for, but I would like to more thoroughly understand the differences between them from an aerodynamic perspective. Anywho, I would opt for DWG 2000 since most CAD can read those files in without an issue. Also, I would recommend PDF drawings be placed out there to replace the old templates since many may opt to use the traditional method. Great job! I look forward to seeing more templates in CAD soon! I looked at the plans earlier too, great job on those as well! -Chris

These are very nice Adrian, very professional looking! Now, if someone has plans to verify these against we can vett them! May I ask how you drew these? Did you trace or take a certain number of points along upper surface and lower surface and use a spline to generate? What I was thinking of doing was taking a set of points, once every half inch or so. I was thinking of measuring each point several times and taking the average of the measurements and then importing them as a set of points and drawing a curve through them. That was my plan for the wing templates at least. Anwyho, may be a moot point since these look great, and we just need to verify them against the original drawings! Great job! -Chris

-This is why I suggest we get an outside professional source to convert all the templates. That way we know that things all line up to the originals! When you say it looks OTHER THAN THAT [i.e. those errors] OK, that makes me cringe. The original plans weren't perfect, but we want "Perfect" (Within some agreed upon tolerance, ~1/8" I've seen thrown around a little) to the originals as a starting point for CAD templates. That way we all can feel comfortable we're starting in the same place as the paper templates. I guess this is a moot point though, we do already have "correct" templates to print from that are paper. In the end, builder variation will be what it will be, but if we want to do this right and produce CAD templates, I vote for having a sole professional source we can hold accountable for being correct in the conversion of ALL the templates at one time. Just how I feel . -Chris

Hi Adrian, I understand where you are coming from! I agree if we have CAD templates that are already verified as 100% Accurate, 'nuff said. Where have you posted the 100% verified Roncz templates? I would like to download them as I get ready for the build. Thank you very much for making them! I am working on getting some CAD together for the bulkheads as I have not seen a comprehensive set for them. Do you know of anyone who has 100% verified CAD drawings of the wing and winglet templates? Thanks for letting me know we already have some of this stuff. What I have been seeing is that people are making CAD left and right, but I had not seen that they were verified against the plans! Have a great day and thank you for your contribution to the Open EZ project! -Chris

Hey Vortal, I agree we can do it here. The reason I asked if we should have this professionally done is so that we know the lines are "line-on-line" so to speak. A professional will be able to use the software they have to convert the images, and then they would be able to compare the originals easily to the created ones using more sophisticated methods than what I think we're capable of (If I am wrong and someone has that ability please speak up!). I am not nearly as concerned about the bulkhead drawings as I would be the wing/canard/winglet templates. Those should be exact, even if builder variation will change them once started. This way, the design integrity and intent remains the same from original to Open EZ . That's my $0.02 on why we should consider it as opposed to someone on the forum just doing it. This way we have a professional source for the templates that we can all accept as correct without reasonable doubt... Thanks for the input! -Chris

I have been looking through these forums on the Open EZ project and loving what I am seeing so far! A lot of collaboration, some great posts about drawings being re-done in CAD, and I think to myself, WOW, a forum of people are coming together to breathe new life into a beautiful design! I too have decided I want to build one (Terf CD Purchase in March '09) time-frame. In the mean-time I have a desire to do what Vortal is doing from the CAD drawing perspective. Here is a proposal I want to throw out there: -If we have a set of "Master" templates we can agree on as a Forum (Jon Matcho's would be my first instinct), I propose that we send the drawings to a professional CAD conversion shop and have them converted into A Couple of different formats: -DXF -DWG -Pro Engineer -Catia -Etc.... This way, by using a professional CAD conversion source, we can get exact replicates of the template "master" files we have to work with. This way, we can truly start from the same place. I DO NOT KNOW HOW MUCH IT WILL COST, but I thought it would be worthwhile if Jon agreed to at least get a quote from a Conversion shop. I didn't want to go ahead and send these guys http://www.formatconversion.com/ a copy of Jon's Rev 5 drawings without some nods of approval to get a price quote. Here's my thoughts on the tentative plan should we as a group decide to do this: -Send drawing of wing templates to http://www.formatconversion.com/ and get a price quote back -This price would be for converting the data to a single layer and producing the formats above -If we agree on the price, maybe we could set up a fund we can contribute to in order to raise the $ for it as a group. I don't know if we'd just ask for donations or who would collect and execute this task, but we can decide later if we choose to move forward. -Have company create CAD re-prints -Post CAD in dedicated area for files where people can Download them (For free since this isn't for profit) I figure this way, if we send them all drawings at once we want converted (RONCZ, BULKHEADS, and WING TEMPLATES, Etc...), we can get a "Baseline" CAD version of the template prints for the Open EZ. If this has no benefit from this communities' point of view I guess this post will not mean much, but if it does, then we can have assuredly accurate CAD versions of the templates in one swoop. In the end we can probably get correct CAD templates as a forum eventually (For free back and forth etc..), but I think this would be a quicker way to get to an end objective together as a forum so we can have a consistent set of templates in CAD from a professional source. From the discussions earlier I still don't see how this would violate copyright law, so I hope we're still in-bounds . Anywho, thanks for listening! -Chris Z.

I would imagine the important parts of the CAD model would be the main dimensions and the precise locations of all the attach points. I would be interested in one too if anyone has it, I was going to model this at a later date but will welcome anyone who has a model they are willing to share! Thanks for bringing this up! -Chris

Wow, It's great to hear such good responses about this! I was definitely under the wrong impression about the prices of the engines, which I am happy to hear! I'll have to consider the 540 now in my plans, still not sure if I'll go that route though. It sounds like the benefits are improved top end performance, improved rate of climb and TKO distance without the worry of density altitude effects. The price you typically pay would be about $10K more, and requires modification of the turtledeck. You also pay with greater fuel burn, but can get similar burn @ cruise. I would imagine the oil cooling system needs to get larger presumably with a larger heat load. From a front seat weight perspective, does it help much to have the larger engine in the back to balance out the CG? I'll do some more digging into that in the next couple days! Thanks again! -Chris

Forgive the Noob here, but when I looked at a 360 Vs. 540 at the sites I was at (Lycoming, and others) there was a HUGE difference in price. The 360's I saw were about $23-25K NEW and the 540's were $65K+ NEW. Am I gravely mistaken that this is the true price difference? I was planning to use the 360 but if the 540 reall isn't that much different (For me that's like $27-35K instead of $65K) than the 360 then I would tend to go with more power and retracts to get the added speed advantage and the performance benefits. I saw info on Chris' aircraft and I thought I saw cruise data saying the fuel burn was comparable to a 360 in his cruise configuration with a constant speed prop...

Coolamber, Have you come any further in your drawings? I am interested in modelling whichever plans I buy in Wildfire 4.0 as I go to check for issues when I do my mods! I think I will probably have to scan in the images somehow of the life-sized parts (Since dimensions aren't provided on them as I have heard) templates. Not sure how that will go at this point, but I guess we'll see! Anywho, good luck, and I hope it turned out well for you! -Chris

These guys look fairly promising, have been working on stuff for years now though, hopefully something will come of it! http://www.moller.com/ They have lift fans for VTOL, and though it does use buttloads of energy at first, they do re-configure for level flight . I think it also has a BRS that can deploy at insanely low altitudes. Looks like fun to me! Check this one out, looks like it's from Aliens! http://www.moller.com/m400.htm "Move it Spunkmeyer, we're rolling" Where will they put the custom mods on? I don't see a place to put spinners on the wheels . Also, where are the fold out missile pods? Gotta have something to help take care of those pesky sunday fliers and slower aircraft :-P.... Air rage would take on a whole new dimension if even 1 in 100 households had one of these puppies and they were trying to fly to work :-P -Chris

Wow, What a huge host of posts, all with good insight! Thanks for running the FEM on it Marc! Edge, neat idea of doing extended strakes with a window in them, that's something to consider! How are you working to accomplish the molding? Cozy Girrl has a good point about impact.... Does anybody have any data from any accidents that show how an impact can affect this region of the aircraft? I thought these windows would be cool in flight and also serve a purpose of allowing visibility to the ground in higher angles of attack. Added visibility is always good! I'd be curious to know how this person mounted and reinforced his fuselage to accomodate the windows. Either way they look cool and I think it's something I will consider modding in after I have thought about the crash related stuff some more. Don't want to trade safety for looks! Thanks for the posts, keep em' coming! -Chris

Hey Fellas and Fellets , Ever seen this modification on a Cozy Mk IV? Does someone know who's aircraft this is? I would be very interested in incorporating this into my airframe from increased visibility and it looks pretty sweet! I'd like to open discussion on the implications of incorporating this into a design. Is there a kit for it somewhere I am un-aware of? What are the structural implications, and how big could they get? Any insight would be greatly appreciated! -Chris

Howdy, What a great number of posts back, with some very thoughtful ideas! Good point about throttle redundancy too! To John's point, i am going to make my Cozy/Aerocanard a 3 Seat with 1 in the front. This is due to space limitations and front seat loading (I'm a bigger guy, too much to have another person over 150 lbs in the front seat with me and wide shouldered). I figure this will be the optimum wagon family truckster. What I was thinking for the back throttle is using a push-rod type and mount it in the panel I will put back there. There won't be much of one, but I will put all the basics and no rudders. With the weight margin I would have I could take 3 full sized adults with almost full fuel and still have ~90 lbs baggage, but no room to put it . Guess that leaves room for a nice in-flight entertainment system . Thanks for the thoughts so far! Let me know what you think of a push/pull throttle for the back as a back-up to the primary in the front... -Chris

Do you know anyone who put controls in the back of a Cozy? Thanks for the cool photos Kent! -Chris

Hi Folks, Any pictures of a Cozy III front seat and back seats? I am trying to get a feel for how the controls are laid out in these aircraft. Thank you! -Chris

If the aircraft was not gaining altitude that would seem to indicate an engine failure correct? Are there other possible issues that would allow the aircraft to not gain altitude? Maybe a really fwd loaded CG out of normal limits? Any thoughts on how a supercharger could cause a loss of power that would not allow the pilot to gain altitude? If he pulled back on the stick hard, could he have gotten into a nose high attitude and stalled? I was under the impression you can't do that unless you have an aft loaded CG behind limits in a Canard due to the canard stalling first etc... Just looking to entertain thoughts/speculation about what could cause no gain in altitude at this critical phase of flight, any insights? I am sorry that we lost another fellow pilot, a passenger, and a person on the ground in an accident, I hope we can learn why... -Chris Z.