Category: Projects

Builders:

Following up on the topic of flat heads, here is the flagship of our personal flat head fleet. Pictured is a tiny flat head Ford from a 1948 Anglia. If you know model A’s, this engine will look very familiar.

Above, the busy side. This is a four-cylinder engine, but it is only 71 cubic inches. It has a nominal HP rating or 8 or 10 by some English taxation system, but its actual power output is about 20 ponies. This engine came in a very small car, a 1948 Anglia, built by Ford in England. I got the engine from Vern, who had it for 25 or 30 years. I have motored it over with a very powerful drill, and it has good compression. The only thing missing is the starter. The transmission is a 3 speed that would fit in a coffee can. The engine was built in England, but the design is pure Ford.

For size, that is a 12″ ruler sitting on the head. the item ay the lower right is an external water pump. The clutch is a 6″ unit. For a while I thought about making a 3/4 scale Pietenpol Sky scout with it, then gave some thought to re-engining our tiny Case tractor with it. It is a bite sized marvel of simplicity, and it makes you day dream of a use for it.

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As an aside, I looked on the web and found that the starter is very easy to buy from clubs and shops in England where Angilas were predominantly sold. There are car clubs that restore and drive them there. The main thing Americans did with Anglias was use the bodies for dragsters.

Above, a blown, injected Big Block Chevy powers this American ’48 Anglia. It will run a 1/4 mile in the mid seven second range. Thats zero to 180 mph in less than eight seconds. This car probably has 75 times the original power output of the little flat head.

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When I contacted the people in England, a funny thing happened: They refused to sell me any part, including a manual for the engine. They pointed out that their website said “Absolutely no sales to Americans.” When I asked why, I was told that they were ‘afraid of being sued.’ I politely asked if they had ever heard of a single person in the US who had ever sued anyone in England over any vehicle part. They couldn’t name one, but they had decided to live in fear of this, even though there is no legal mechanism to allow it to happen. I pointed out that I was not likely to get hurt in a 20 hp car. No luck. Just because I am a jackass, I asked them if a guy wrote them from Pakistan and said he needed a part to finish the car bomb he had made out of an Anglia so he could drive it down to the market place, could he buy it? Answer: “Well, we don’t have any rules against that, so yes, but we do have rules against selling to Americans.”

Above, Nevil Shute. Pilot, builder, enginner and writer.

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We have a number of friends in Great Britain. 145 years ago 50% of my DNA lived there.  My favorite Aero engineer of all time is Nevil Shute. I have a 1959 Triumph 650. On the topic of English history, I am the most well read American most people have ever met. I like many things about the people there, but in many ways, today’s Britons live in a fear driven bureaucracy I would find maddening. Not only are they afraid of impossible lawsuits, you find other things like flying a Corvair there is illegal (technically it is under review, but is has been so for 10 years.) You can not build a Pietenpol in Britain, because the design was deemed, without any evidence, to be horribly dangerous. The Pietenpols in Britain look like ours, but their government paid professionals to design a new structure for it, presumably in the name of ‘safety.’  Fair enough: Would you like to build their ‘better’ version? You can’t, because of course they will not sell Americans the drawings.

Above, A man, a plane and an engine. In Britain, by bureaucratic decree, he is a dangerous person to be stopped, the design unairworthy, the engine not to be flown. Here, the engine flies by the hundreds, the plane has been built for eight decades, and the man is hailed as the patron saint of homebuilding. The Atlantic is very wide, but the gulf between perspectives is wider.

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In the history of aviation Britain has had many outstanding pilots engineers and builders. They made many fantastic designs. If you like motorcycles, you know that the British ruled the roads for 50 years. They made great machines, even if we like to make fun of Lucas electrics. If their traditional creativity was unleashed, many people in America would be flying British designed and kitted experimentals, instead of the tiny fraction of their designs that are flown here. But somewhere along the line, for reasons I don’t claim to understand, they dropped out of the running.

A man I have never met, named Francis Donaldson, has been the sole person in Great Britain passing judgement over what people there will be allowed to build. As far as I can tell, he does this on his own personal whim. He has been in charge of this since 1990, yes, the same job, one guy 23 years.  Many people from England have told me he is a nice guy, but I am not inclined to like a person who has been telling people for 23 years that a Pietenpol, a plane flying here for 84 years, is unairworthy.

Maybe if I was raised to believe that I was a ‘subject’, that God selected a king to rule me, and that a type of human called an ‘aristocrat’ was a better ‘class’ than me, I would have much more tolerance for one man arbitrarily making decisions for me. But alas, 50% of my ancestors left that behind when they got in 4th class steerage to come here, a land where they would be judged by their hard work and ethics, not their ‘class status.’ I am just another one of those “Crass Colonials” who doesn’t know his place, who will never understand the wisdom of a life appointment bureaucrat making decisions for me.

If you live on this side of the pond, and you like airplanes, go back to the family tree and thank the person who had the wisdom to get on the boat. Over the years, I have heard aviators who were political extremists from both sides of the fence make the stupid comment “If so and so wins, I am leaving.” What a joke. It would be nice if everyone who ever said that did us a favor and followed through, but I can’t think of a single one who ever did. This is your proof that things are not perfect for aviators here, just better than anywhere else.

Tonight, perhaps 200 people in America are going out to their workshops, to put in a few hours of progress on their Corvair powered Pietenpol project. When completed, many of these planes will be masterpieces like Mike Groahs, Gary Boothe’s and Kurt Shipman’s. Most will be good solid planes, and a handful will be pieces of feces. Every one of them can get an airworthyness cert. for phase one flight testing because the neither the FAA nor a DAR can deny a builder one. Here we believe that humans should be in charge of their own lives, including the potential to end these lives. Truly ironic that Darwin was from England, but we are the ones who recognize his genius in social engineering. This, in place of a lifetime bureaucrat is the single biggest reason why American designs dominate the world-wide homebuilt market.

We are not better than other people, we are not special humans. Unless your family was here in 1491, we are the other people, a nation of people from somewhere else. In this experiment, the people are the same, only the system is different.  We  have a system that allows the individuals who are better, work harder and are gifted to rise to the top. I don’t feel better than fellow aviators elsewhere, I just feel lucky to be here, working in our system. Some people here like to gripe, and that’s fine, as long as it comes with the acknowledgement that aviation freedom is a lot easier to pursue here.

If you are one of the two hundred, celebrate your good luck and freedom by going out to the shop to work on a plane that, were you living in Britain, would land you in prison after your first flight.  Do some solid work tonight that would make Bernard proud. Think of your fellow aviators, men just like you, but fate determined you to have freedom to build as you mind wishes and your hands are able, and they must wait another decade or two for the whim of a bureaucrat to change. When you are done for the night, take a few minutes to admire your work. Offer a salute to your brother aviators  living in repression on the other side of the pond by drinking a Cold beer.-ww

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*If any friends from the other side of the pond are heading to Brodhead or Oshkosh, I welcome you to come over and lecture me at length about what a crass colonial jackass I am. If you can smuggle a starter out of the kingdom for me, I will print a retraction, sing God save the Queen, and do my best to drink one warm beer with you. If Frances Donaldson is visiting, please advise him that we plan to teach him how to have fun, culminating in him getting drunk on Jack Daniels, taking him Lynyrd Skynyrd concert in an F-250, and flying him around the pattern in an original Pietenpol powered by a Corvair. He may never go home.

Builders,

We have had two unexpected visitors in the hangar lately, and as odd as this sounds, I feel kind of lucky about it. Agkistrodon Piscivorus is the Latin name for Water Moccasin. There are only four poisonous snakes in America, and this is one of them (Florida is the only state that has plenty of all four). In the past week we have had two in the hangar, an unpleasant experience to say the least.

Above, Vern stands by our pond with a 42″ moccasin that I caught with a 20 gauge (2-3/4″ shell with #6 shot) last night at dark. This is big for a moccasin. World record is only 74″, and in 25 years in Florida, the biggest I have seen is about 50″. This size is plenty dangerous. Not often fatal to humans, they do cause lifelong damage by destroying pounds of tissue permanently at the bite location. They frequently kill medium and large dogs. I was closing the hangar door and found him 4 feet away, but this is not close at all.

Last week, Vern stepped on a 36″ moccasin in the doorway to the side of our hangar. It turned and bit right through his boot, injected his venom, but by a miracle, it soaked Vern’s sock, but failed to get his flesh! Vern is an experienced woodsman and a lifelong hunter, but even he needed to sit down for an hour and try to collect himself. For the past week, both of us have jumped out of our skin several times when an air hose or extension cord has brushed an ankle or foot. I was thankful I did not step on mine, and Vern felt a little charmed that he missed being bitten by 1/32nd of an inch.

Environmentalists can rest assured that moccasins are not endangered, there are enough of them in our neighborhood that they are now a trip and fall hazard. Right after I took the photo, Vern tossed him in the pond where he was promptly “re-cycled” by the very large alligator snapping turtle that lives there. He ate the last one also.

For builders who had a chance to see Vern’s aero-trike (1/2 Lancair 320, 1/2 Geo Metro) at Corvair College and Sun n Fun, here is a shot of it driving down Route 17 at 65 mph. I drove it 25 miles the other day, and it handles much better than you might guess. Vern was plagued with computer issues on the Geo’s original EFI set-up. I called Jeron Smith, noted Geo expert at Raven Redrives, and he provided us with a distributor and carb set-up to ditch all the computer and EFI stuff. Worked like a charm. Simplified, the vehicle runs flawlessly. So much for complexity. It gets 50 mpg in mixed driving. Vern even has the A/C working now. He has slightly under $1,000 in the project, total.

When you take the time to learn how to use tools and create things with your own hands, you are freed from only having products made by corporations in factories, designed to suit groups of people who may be nothing like you. If you are willing to get your hands dirty, you can experience the joy of having machines your way. Picking from corporate offerings is not freedom of choice. Deciding what you want to make for yourself is.  -ww

Builders,

Below are photos of three Corvair engines. All of them were sold to new owners this year. The sellers of these engines said things to get the new owners to pick them up, things that we will just call “Less than honest.” One of the engines was said to have been built by myself; another was said to have been inspected by me, and successfully flown; the other was said to have been built “according to the WW manual.” Let’s look at why these statements are not accurate, and at the end I am going to make some serious suggestions about shopping for second-hand engines or engine projects.

Above, a 2700 engine that was built by a WWII B-17 pilot named Sam Sayer of Florida, who has now passed from this earth. The engine was sold with his plane from his estate, then resold to the new owner. I knew Sam, and he was an outstanding human. He was shot down on his first mission by an 88mm flak shell that went through the throttle quadrant but failed to fully detonate. He evaded capture and returned to England. You can read more about him on this 2006 link to our main Web site, a story about Corvair College #9:

http://www.flycorvair.com/cc9d.html

He was a great guy, and I spent a fair chunk of time with him. He was a “regular” at our Edgewater hangar. But this doesn’t mean that the engine he built was airworthy nor worth buying.

Plenty of things are wrong with me; in many ways I am an opinionated jackass and I have made plenty of mistakes in life. But here is something that I do correctly: When a veteran aviator in his 80s shows up at my hangar, doesn’t have a medical, is pretty much aware that he isn’t going flying, and just wants to enjoy himself by exercising some creativity and building something with the hands that still bear the scars of shrapnel from an 88mm shell fired 60 years before, he gets the red carpet treatment.

I am not there to lecture a man my father’s age that he is “Doing it wrong.” It is my task to make that man’s day a little brighter and do anything I can for him: Tools, time, coffee and being a good listener. If a 35-year-old guy came to a College and wanted my help to build and run the above engine and then put it on his plane, the answer is of course “No,” and I am going to make Mr. 35-year-old do it the right way, because he is going to take it flying, and he didn’t sacrifice his youth in 1944 trying to do something to stop fascism. Most aviation companies wouldn’t let a guy like Sam hang around any longer than it would take to find he didn’t have a lot of money to spend: “That’s just good business.” To hell with them, they may be business people, but in my book they are not aviators and they are piss poor Americans if they judge the value of men like Sam by the thickness of their wallet. This country is filled with people who think that having a yellow ribbon sticker on their car that says “Support the Troops” completely fulfills the obligation.

Back to the main point: Look at the photo above. It has no 5th bearing and the crank probably isn’t nitrided. Look at the rust on the hardware. Do you think this was stored wrapped up in a really dry place the past 7 years? The guy who sold this to its current owner said that it was “Assembled by WW for Sam Sayer,” and was selling it for many thousands of dollars. I didn’t build this engine, the guy just said that because he is a B.S. artist who wanted to make a buck. Trust me, he isn’t the only guy like that selling something in aviation.

Above, rear view of the engine: I have not put a rear starter on an engine in 14 years. Note there are no rear tins. I have never put a belt driven alternator on that side of the back of an engine; search the name of my friend “John Blackburn” and “V-6 Ford crash” on my www.FlyCorvair.com Web site to find out why. The valve cover clamps are on backwards, the distributor clamp is the wrong one, none of the accessory brackets are strong enough. I have no idea what is inside this engine, I didn’t build nor assemble it. What I did do with the builder was spend two Veterans Days in a row with Sam in my hangar, treating a great guy with the respect and camaraderie that he deserved.

Round Two: Above is the KR-2 built by David Dergins in Florida circa about 2002. I saw this plane in a housecall, and was very concerned that it would crash on the first flight. Dergins was a very friendly and successful real estate guy, and he had the money to do a good job, he just didn’t have the patience. I told him it needed to be redone. Several months later he brought it to our hangar at Spruce Creek on a trailer to “Show Me” that he had taken my counsel seriously. He had not, and he stated he was going to fly it that week. Kevin, Grace and I had a real dilemma; we had no power to stop him, we were all pretty sure it was going to be an accident, and Dergins had already shown that he wasn’t going to listen to advice. We were looking at a bomb that was going to destroy a lot of the reputation of Corvairs that we had worked to build, we had no way to defuse it, and after it went off, we all knew that few people would understand that we had really tried to defuse it. I had already been in the engine business for 10 years at that point, and I knew the story would be “And Dave, that wonderful craftsman, had it up at WW’s hangar just the week before for his approval.” Dergins took it home in anger, and later said that he did get it off the ground, had problems on rotation, did a very low 180 and said he would never fly it again. He said to me several times that I was wrong, it did “fly.” By a miracle, the bomb was a dud. It was as if he had fashioned a suicide vest made to look something like a clothing line we sell, but at the last moment, it didn’t go off.

Above, Dergin’s engine. Look at the front cover and compare it to Sam Sayer’s. Sam had craftsmanship but little money, Dergins had money but no craftsmanship. To settle the academic debate, I would rather fly Sam’s engine, but in reality, no one should fly either. Just get a look at the intake logs on the head. Yes, this engine will run, but cylinders 5 & 6 will run super rich, 1 & 2 will run very lean, and the head gaskets will blow in a few minutes of climb. The seller of this aircraft represented it as a KR-2 in flyable condition that has a WW inspected engine. Factually true? Yes, if you get into legal debates such as “It depends on what your definition of ‘is’ is.” For the rest of us, we can just say that the seller is not an honest man. I have spoken with the new owner, and he is a good guy who fully understands that every single part needs to come out of this and be looked at with a very critical inspection.

Round Three: Above is the inside of a case of an engine that I tore down for the second owner. The guy who built it and sold it stated that it was built according to my manual. I ask all the reasonable builders to show me the part in my manual that tells builders to overspray all the rotating engine parts with orange paint. This was under the bearings, down in the lifter bores, and in the oil galleries. I guess he didn’t want the inside of the aluminum case, bathed in oil, to get all rusty? Looking at the engine, and reflecting on my communication with the orignal builder, I will tell you that this engine wasn’t a budget nor a craftmanship problem, it was an attitude problem. Specifically, the builder didn’t like taking advice from someone whom he perceived as a long-haired, opinionated, know-it-all, punk kid from Florida.

First, I do have long hair, live in Florida, and I am a jackass, but even if you hate me, that doesn’t invalidate my words on engines. Maybe now that I am 50 years old we can put the “He is too young to know a lot about planes” crap to rest. I may not know every single thing about engines, but comparing my understanding of Corvairs with this builder, I am Albert Einstein (and I have the hair style to prove it).

Above, a piston assembly out of the engine. That’s not just a cast piston, that is a Chinese-made cast piston. That symbol, just ahead of the wrist pin, is “Genuine Brand,” a massive, low quality Chinese engine partmaker’s logo. Their Web site says they are ISO-9001 certified, but this is taking the word of people who claim Mao Tse-tung was a great humanitarian, and that everyone in Tibet welcomes the 50 year Chinese military occupation of their country.  When I say that every flight engine needs forged pistons, it goes without saying that you don’t consider using cast ones from a communist police state.

The engine had many such “features” inside. Every single one of them was the result of the original builder saying “This will be alright,” or “This is just as good.” Often the justification for going against the experience I share falls into two categories: The builder doesn’t like me personally, or he is going to “show me” what he knows. Neither of these are good motivation for taking a detour from what we know to work.

Most often, the people who have decided they don’t like me have never met me. Out of 2,000 pages of written information on our Web sites, they have found a few sentences that they deem offensive, or they got set off by the moniker “The Corvair Authority,” or they thought the words “The Corvair movement” sounded like some hippie commune. From that point forward, they decided they were justified to selectively reject information from me that didn’t validate their existing mindset. That’s how you get cast pistons from China in a flight engine. Know this: If I threw away everything I learned about airplanes from people whom I didn’t find charming, I would know about 50% of what I do. Just because you don’t want someone like me for a son-in-law, that doesn’t invalidate what I have to say about Corvairs.

Second, I have encountered many people who were going to “show everyone” something, namely how wrong I am on some topic. This is very poor motivation for anything that is potentially as dangerous as flying. Usually it is just a waste of time and money, like when a quitter named Robert Haynes told everyone on the Net he was going to show everyone the things I say about EFI are wrong. (He never even made the engine run, far less fly.) But it is also a very dangerous motivation, and it played a role in the fatal accident of Steve Jones, a great guy, but a hyper-competitive person who always falsely believed that everyone around him was judging his efforts. I have a handwritten letter from him saying that he was going to have the fastest KR-2 or die trying. His accident was testing CG locations, but I hold that his attitude on “showing everyone” was the underlying cause of it. If you ever detect that you are about to do something in aviation that you normally wouldn’t, but some part of you wants to impress others, just stop. Just stop.

In summary, don’t buy a second-hand engine, no matter what anyone tells you about it. The average asking price of the engines above was more than $5,000. Sound like a bargain? The motivation to get a deal or a running start is not valid. You are not in a contest to see how cheap you can build an engine, and you are not in a race either. Both of those mindsets come from day-to-day life outside of building and flying.

You have to identify thoughts and motivations like that and shelve them when getting down to learning, building and flying. You are here to learn as much as you can, build a first class engine, and operate it with intelligence and good decision-making. We are not here to waste money, but it isn’t going to be “cheap.” It is going to require investment, not primarily of your money, but something more valuable: your best effort. Anyone who can take advice and read can do better work than the engines above. They were not a bargain, even if they were free, because accepting these as a starting point is about looking for something of a deal or a shortcut. If you come across one of these, recognize that the primary problem with them isn’t mechanical. If an advertised engine like the ones above has appeal, it is an indication that you have not yet come to see that you can be a better craftsman than you realize, a craftsman who will not accept the work of others as good enough. Developing that understanding is the real value in building experimental aircraft.  -ww

Builders,

A while back we shared the story of Jim and Ginger (JaG) Tomaszewski’s twin-engine project. You can read the original story in Jim’s words at this link:

JAG-2, Corvair Powered Twin, Jim Tomaszewski, N.Y.

Jim just sent in two more photos of his progress, seen below.

Above, a look at the wing extension. Having the engine on the wing is a ‘releving load’ on the wing spar, much in the same way that tip tanks are. Even though the wing is extended, it may feel no higher bending load at the root.

There was a time when the EAA was made of builders, when a guy like Jim was still a stand out, but his work and motivation to create would have been understood by any EAA member. We still have plenty of people like that, but we now have a more ‘inclusive’ EAA membership and a management to go with them, that often seems to forget what the first word in the acronym EAA stands for.

 In the Corvair movement we have never lost our respect for the dedicated craftsman willing to put forth the extra effort to design, test, and fly his own creation, to build something really original. To my perspective, you do not have to build an original design to be a ‘real homebuilder.’ I think that the guy who builds a good Zenith, RV, Sonex or Rans that is the mechanical equivalent of other proven examples of his design is just as much a homebuilder as Jim, and I think Jim would agree with that.

The distinction to me is easier made on this dividing line: If you are the kind of builder that supports Jim’s right and passion to develop his own unique machine, even if it is not something you would choose for yourself, or even a design that you appreciate or fully understand, then you are a real homebuilder. You understand that at the very core of homebuilding is individual choice, challenge and achievement, something that we each should be able to pursue on a path of our own choosing.

I expect people from outside aviation to miss the point of home building. I can even see a person from a far branch of flight not ‘getting’ a project like Jim’s. But if a person in the EAA would criticise or seek to restrict the freedom to do original designs, I believe they forfeit the right to call themselves a ‘homebuilder.’

Such a person is too dull to see the connection that leads from Jim’s plane, through Dan and his Panther, through countless creative craftsmen. It is the same compelling force that was present with the Wright’s at Kitty hawk.  Any person who suggests that we should all build O-320 powered RV-6a’s and that flying them in regular patterns at controlled airports is homebuilding, has missed why Americans wrote much of the history of aviation, they have missed what homebuilding is about, and they understand nothing about being an individual. Their self-inflicted punishment is that they live in a ‘safer’ but far lesser world,  a place that traded Heros and Champions for living in fear and hoping for a tiny bit of safety increase.

At it’s very core, homebuilding has the power to liberate you from allowing thoughts like that to creep into your mind. If you are going to spend thousands of hours building a machine to seek your own freedom, then it makes sense to start by rejecting anyone who has a smaller deffiniton of freedom already picked out for you.-ww