Builders,
Below is a picture of Dan’s new Panther Cowl roughed in on the front of his prototype. He and Rachel did this work over a 7 hour stretch on Sunday. I stopped by their hangar and saw it at this stage. It looks even better in person. The interesting side of this story is the method that Dan selected to produce this cowl. In short, he started with a RV-3 cowl and a Cleanex nose bowl and a very good imagination because very few people could picture how he was going to bring those together on the front of a single place aircraft. If you follow the link at the bottom, you can see the actual step by step process. There is still a lot of work to go, but this part will have been vastly faster to make than a traditional cowl made of carved foam blocks or plaster.
Dan borrowed my mock up/ demo engine and put it on his mount with the intake and exhaust in place. It rests inside the cowl in the photos. For all the people who have some question as to how sleek a cowl can be made, note that this cowl houses our regular front starter set up. The spinner is the same Van’s 13″ unit we have used since 2003 and promote for use with our nosebowl. At a glance, this cowl may look something like an RV-3 or 4 cowl, but as you go through the photos you can see that Dan has narrowed it more than 6.” Keeping the formula that served him well in his highly successful Cleanex development, Dan is utilizing as much of proven Corvair as he can and keeping changes to an absolute minimum. The panther has it own mount, intake and exhaust, but these are just adaptations of our systems long proven and flying on other aircraft. Obviously it will have its own cowl, but all other Corvair parts on the Panther installation are components right out of our existing catalogs of Parts. -ww
