Corvair College #10 Part 3
November 10-12, 2006
Morgan Hunter flew down the Personal Corvair Cruiser that debuted last week on our Web site. The very shapely plane above sported Morgan's first
class craftsmanship and attracted a lot of positive attention. It has less than five hours on it, but we are well within his flight test zone.
Morgan is skilled, modest, young and ambitious. His cute and charming girlfriend Ashton showed up and it was enough to make most builders hate him.
The PC Cruiser engine installation, above. I built the engine and mount several years ago. The prop and spinner are the same as a 601's.
It has an Ellison EFS-3A carb, and the same long oil cooler as Bill Clapp's plane. The rear mounted oil filter and alternator originally
flew on our 601 in the Summer of 2004. These are the same pieces that are on the Conversion Manual's cover photo. The John Deere alternator
runs off the harmonic balancer groove. I do not recommend this installation for other aircraft. The PC Cruiser has a unique cowling that
precludes an alternator on the front. This same setup worked well on our 601 for 60 hours, but Morgan has experienced over-voltage
issues. The night before the College, I performed our alternator pulley mod to slow down the John Deere unit, which improved the situation
enough for him to fly down, but a review of his wiring is in order. This is what the flight test phase of your airplane is all about.
The cockpit of the Wicked Cleanex. If you still haven't seen it, you owe it to yourself to get a copy of
Corvair Flyer DVD #1, featuring smooth aerobatics in this aircraft.
Above, our 601 takes off with one of the many builders it flew during the event. The aircraft is now approaching 400 hours.
About 120 people have flown in it. Gus said that a major change in this College was the amount of rides given by other pilots.
An important landmark I'd like to move toward is 100 builders flown at a Corvair fly-in. It would require an increase in planes
and builders, but this increase seems inevitable with the growth of the Corvair movement.
Kneeling in the photo above is Arnold "The Repair" Holmes. Arnold had a lot of flight time in my Pietenpol, including a lot of
serious cross country work. At the video camera is Merrill "Skymanta" Isaacson. He has shot and edited all of our video and DVD
work. Here, he films Arnold discussing dynamic prop balancing before working on Mark Langford's aircraft. Although his installation
was quite smooth beforehand, Mark wrote a very favorable review of Arnold's work after his flight home. Most of Arnold's work has
been done on Lancair IV-Ps. He's well known in the industry for his Semloh Aviation business (Semloh is Holmes spelled backwards).
Above is the readout side of Arnold's dynamic prop balancing setup. This unit is considered high end industry standard, and
to be really useful requires a significant degree of operator experience. After analyzing several start and run cycles, it provides
him with enough information to pick the location, radius and mass of a weight put on the spinner bulkhead. This can have dramatic
results in smoothing out an engine's operation. Besides what you can feel with the seat of your pants, this type of balancing has
a proven track record of making radios, instruments and internal engine components last a lot longer.
Above is the sensor that Arnold bolted on Mark's engine. It must have a very rigid mounting to do its job. It has one other sensor
to pick up the rpm of the engine optically off a propeller blade. The entire test and correction usually takes about an hour.
Saturday night was cookout time. When our borrowed grill didn't work well, builders ran out and got a low tech charcoal model
that was hastily assembled by Mark Langford and Phil Maxson. Above, Morgan Hunter tends the grill during the cookout. Although he
looks young enough to be in high school, he's old enough to drink the beer he's holding by two whole years.
After Mark's plane was done, Arnold went to work on Joe Horton's. Joe's plane was closer to balanced, but Arnold still made
measurable improvements. This work was done before the cookout Saturday night. After the cookout we had an extensive and entertaining Power Point presentation
organized by 601 XL builder Fred Roser of Ocala, Fla.
At the end of the show, I announced that the winner of the Steve Jones trophy was Mark Langford for flying 292 hours in 365 days.
The award, the trophy and reflections on Steve's accomplishments will be covered in a separate page shortly.
The work continued on Sunday. Above, Mississippi engineering student Cedric Gould holds up his cylinder head with Mark from Falcon Automotive. Cedric's
core engine came from the University. It was used to power a helicopter rotor test stand 40 years ago. It was a brand new
motor that only ran 50 hours in controlled conditions. Mark pronounced the heads absolutely mint.
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