Sommaire pour September 2025 de KITPLANES

IN THE TWO PREVIOUS installments I covered polishing preparation and cutting the initial polish with Nuvite NuShine II grade F9. With honest effort, F9 will turn the dull, gray surface of 6061-T6 into a mirror, albeit a mirror with swirls. In this final installment I guide you through the process of honing the mirror with NuShine II grade C and removing swirls with grade S. I also touch on topics related to the care of a polished airplane. Polishing and Cleaning Around Hardware I began Part 2 by concentrating on polishing skins before assembly. Eventually, however, it is necessary to polish over and around hardware. Hardware can prevent the buffing pad from contacting the skin, leaving “shadows” of unpolished aluminum. This can be overcome by holding the buffing pad at…

“TENLEY, IF YOU EVER NEED HELP with your plane, just let me know.” Guys, thank you. Sincerely. I need a lot of help. And having the company of friends at the hangar is literally the best thing ever. So, I can’t even begin to tell you how much I love the assistance. Oftentimes though, it can be tricky to take people up on the offer because I don’t even know what I’m doing. We end up doing a lot of brainstorming, so patience and passion are key. And fortunately, I have friends with both. The Big Oops There was one day a couple of months ago where I knew exactly what I needed. My dear friend and pilot protege, Jessie Davison, happened to stop by that day. “Jessie! I have…

A BAFFLE DUCT is a simple device that channels cooling air from behind one of the cylinders down to an oil cooler, but if any of the commercially available models don’t fit your particular fire wall-forward layout, it’s pretty easy to make one out of fiberglass. My 13-row oil cooler is fitted with a 4-inch SCAT tubing flange, but there isn’t enough room on the baffle behind the Number 3 cylinder to place a 4-inchdiameter round flange to feed it. Even a rectangle wouldn’t fit very well there. To get around that limitation, I came up with a shape that fits the area better—sort of a rectangle with one sloping side that follows the slope of the baffle with the same area of a 4-inch circle. So, how do you…

BY THE TIME YOU READ THIS, AirVenture 2025 will be a memory, and I hope I crossed paths with many of you. Those of you who are currently building an aircraft may have made some buying decisions after seeing some recently introduced products. Personally, I don’t usually wait for AirVenture to make those decisions, for a couple of reasons. Admittedly, patience is not one of my virtues, and a long time ago I realized that most of the time there are long lead times associated with products introduced at shows. As I mentioned in one of my earlier columns, project management is a large part of the whole experience when it comes to building an aircraft, as not having the right parts/kits at the proper time can cause setbacks and…

The FAA defines minimum fuel for flight, but I find the FAR vague on two points, which I’ll touch on after reviewing the exact text of FAR 91.151, Fuel requirements for flight in VFR conditions: (a) No person may begin a flight in an airplane under VFR conditions unless (considering wind and forecast weather conditions) there is enough fuel to fly to the first point of intended landing and, assuming normal cruising speed— (1) During the day, to fly after that for at least 30 minutes; or (2) At night, to fly after that for at least 45 minutes. What if there is no “first point of intended landing”? I’ve flown cross-countries like I ramble on motorcycle road trips—each stop chosen, literally, on the fly. The other vagary, to me,…

KEN AND DIANE unloaded the car, placing bags and boxes next to the small, two-place airplane. “This will be a hoot,” said Diane. “Our first trip! Should we think about what we forgot to take before we get halfway there and then think of it?” “I can’t imagine how we could have forgotten anything,” replied Ken, looking at the pile of boxes. “I don’t think it’s going to all fit.” “I thought you figured this out at home with the scale,” asked Diane. “I did,” replied Ken. “I’m not sure what happened. But we gotta get going.” They jammed everything they could into the plane and taxied off to the runway. The airplane lifted off, sluggish, and as it did Diane had the stick almost all the way forward. “This…

MY 2020 OFF-ROAD TRUCK startles me almost every day. I pull up to a drive-through or stop at a stop sign and suddenly—the engine quits! To be honest, this is often not noticeable unless the windows are down, but it happens, by design, whenever the computer thinks you’re going to be stopped long enough that it can save some gas (and emissions) by turning off for a few seconds. This is startling for a driver who is also a pilot because, well—we don’t like engines to stop running without us asking them to do so. Now for someone who is old enough to remember having a manual choke in a car, it is actually quite astounding that the designers of modern engines are confident enough that the motor will restart,…

While it has always been straightforward to measure objective aircraft performance with watches, speed indicators, and altimeters, the subjective quality of flight has been more slippery. This is partly because different pilots prefer different characteristics in different airplanes. The Cooper-Harper Scale was developed to give test pilots a uniform method of judging handling qualities by asking them to rate the acceptability/difficulty of the airplane to perform a specific task. For instance, the landing flare: How easy or hard is it for the pilot to complete without compensating for deficiencies? A perfect airplane (“don’t you dare touch it”) is given a rating of 1 while an unflyable airplane gets a 10. The 1 to 10 scale is broken up into four levels: Ratings of 1-3 are acceptable as is, 4-6 “warrant…

You’ll find most “metal” airframes are a mixed-media art form, perhaps with fabric control surfaces or wings, or fiberglass fairings, cowling, or wheel pants. Browse polished P-51s, Texans, and DC-3s and you may be surprised how much of each, including aluminum, is actually painted silver. Why? Labor. The tops of P-51 wings are mostly invisible on the ground and the bottoms pass overhead so quickly that the effort to polish and maintain them is not practical. Blending painted parts with polished surfaces requires silver paint if you wish to preserve the lines of the airplane but…what shade of silver? There is no shade that can match a polished surface in all lighting conditions, so we do our best and hope for the same. The silver I originally chose proved too…

AFTER COBBLING TOGETHER my umpteenth hotbox—essentially a cardboard box with a hair dryer managed by a PID temperature controller and insulated with a few old blankets—I decided it was finally time to build a semi-proper curing oven. While I never left those setups unattended, they weren’t exactly safe. Plus, setting one up and tearing it down every time cost me 15 minutes or more. Over the course of the SR-1 Project, I’ve likely lost several days to that routine alone. For years, I’ve watched Craigslist and machinery auction sites hoping to snag an affordable autoclave. These programmable ovens double as pressure vessels, allowing high-temp, high-pressure vacuum bagging. But new ones cost many airplane units, and even non-pressurized industrial ovens carry hefty price tags. As the industry moves toward more accessible…

MY RV-8 WAS THE FIRST PLANE that I started and finished from a kit. I’d been working on my own certified airplanes for 30 years or more, but this was the first that I “created.” It sort of got a reputation in the RV world as something special—but honestly, I just think that was good promotion for websites, a little bit of perceived “magic” that it was built by a NASA Flight Director. And I did have a paint job very nicely executed by a shop known, at the time, for great work. But the bottom line was that the airplane was—and is—essentially bone stock. Yup, I did a fancy panel (for the time), but the structure, interior (other than some storage bins on the sidewalls), firewall forward—pretty much just…

LATELY, I’VE BEEN HELPING my neighbor, Ed, buck rivets for his latest RV-6 project. Between building four RVs and working on warbirds as a volunteer at the Castle Air Museum in Atwater, California, Ed has set tens of thousands of rivets. So he has a pretty good feel for how long the exposed tail should be and what the diameter of a properly set rivet should look like. That being said, it had been a while since his last project, so Ed pulled out his rivet gauge set and showed me how to inspect the height and diameter of a rivet once it has been set. All good. Except the gauge for AN3 was missing. Since the RV-6 was a quickbuild kit, there was an abundance of factory-set rivets, so Ed…

SOME AIRPLANES EXHIBIT degraded pitch stability and a tendency to pitch up during initial slow-flight testing or explorations of high angle-of-attack flight. This can be extremely dangerous since the airplane may pitch up spontaneously and there is a danger of an unrecoverable deep stall. It is essential to diagnose and fix this pitch-up tendency before the airplane can enter regular service. As we discussed last time, there are two primary aerodynamic causes for this kind of stability change at high angle of attack: interaction of the tail with the wake of the wing and body, and a shift of the lift of the wing/body combination itself. We addressed tail interactions in the last edition of Wind Tunnel, so let us turn our attention to the aerodynamics of the wing (or…

LEGEND HAS IT that when the British Spitfire returned from its first test flight, Captain Joseph “Mutt” Summers climbed out of the cockpit, hopped off the wing, and told the waiting engineers, “Don’t change a thing—it’s perfect!” If true, then the Spitfire was a rare bird—almost never does a new aircraft live up to its design team’s hopes and dreams right out of the box. An airplane’s first flight is really a new starting point in the development process—the refining of the design to become everything it was intended to be. This is as true in the Experimental aircraft world as it is in the factories of the great production aircraft. I thought about Summers as I flew my RV-8 over the Cascades and descended into Oregon’s lush Willamette Valley…

As a first for Van’s, does the RV-15’s high wing pose challenges to obtaining the “RV feel”? It is a radical change from Van’s normal low-wing layout after all. The short answer is yes, but not to the point where Van’s combination of stability, maneuverability, and light control pressures can’t be reached. It depends on where on the stability-maneuverability continuum the designers want an airplane to reside followed by the necessary airframe and control tuning work to achieve their goal. As always, the more stable an airplane the less maneuverable it is and vice versa. Failing some extraordinary requirement it’s up to the engineers tuning the airframe to decide how a design should handle. Roll stability is the main variable between high and low wings. Consider a high-wing airplane—the point…

“SNRRT. SNRRT.” That was the sound my airplane made when I turned the key. Not good—especially when the battery cable wires were also getting rather warm to the touch. I have another project that’s been in storage limbo for a number of years while life happened. I originally bought it for the engine, but now that I have one for the Thorp, I’d like to complete this airplane and make it flyable, too. When it first arrived, I cranked the engine in my driveway and ran it a few times. Now, after 11 years in (very dry) storage, I’m trying again—and no joy. We’re talking about an O-290G that’s been converted for flight, so the starter is a 17-pound Delco-Remy cylindrical boat anchor. Replacing it is expensive, even if you…

BUILDING EXPERIMENTAL plane often boils down to one task: shopping. It can be fun, frustrating, or anywhere in between, but by far the most enjoyable part of shopping is knowing you just saved money. And in aviation, we all know just how much we can save. Deals can be found on secondhand avionics (or new avionics from retailers that don’t charge tax), ELTs, Tefzel wire, engine parts, you name it. Hardware and fasteners are one category where the pieces are not usually expensive, but when you need hundreds of them, it adds up. Let’s talk about nut plates. You have probably seen the most common forms and you may even be lucky enough to have a newer kit where the hardware is supplied for you. These generic nut plates run…

HOMEBUILDERS TRADITIONALLY like their homebuilts to have three main features: They have to be fast, they have to be unusual, and they have to be cheap. The Rutan VariEze is a classic example. Unusual, relatively cheap to build, and amazingly fast on just a hundred horses. In contrast, the Questair Venture gave builders two out of three. Maybe the kit wasn’t cheap (especially with the Continental IO-550G), but the all-metal design drew attention and the blistering 275-mph cruise left nearly every other homebuilt in the dirt. It’s ironic that there’s a model company that sells small kits of “egg” versions of classic aircraft. Yet, in the full-scale world, the Venture gave a real-world imitation of one. That is definitely an egg-shaped fuselage. It has led to a bit of controversy…

“NOT TODAY,” I said aloud as DeKalb, Illinois’ airport vanished under a rivetpocked reflection of the summer sky. I knew DeKalb’s runways well. Whenever I returned to Oshkosh from east or south of Chicago, DeKalb’s FBO tugged at my wallet just as Illinois’ toll roads do when I travel by car. Normally, while tracing the outline of Chicago’s Mode C veil clockwise from its southernmost point to its westernmost point, I would have been setting up to land at DeKalb—not hiding it under a polished wing. But I had taken steps to increase my airplane’s range. DeKalb remained thousands of feet below while my spinner established a 123-n.m. final for Oshkosh’s Runway 36. There was no $100 burger at my destination, but if there had been, it would have cost $78.…

GORDON NAUTA WAS a pro metal man, working the SoCal aerospace scene when he built this Starduster to go Reno air racing in the late 60s. That he did, along with contests on the East Coast, explaining how he crossed the U.S. several times in the diminutive single-seater. Nauta eventually moved on to a Pitts for racing and sold the Starduster, the poor thing moving from one wellintentioned owner to the next but eventually being stored outside in Oregon until the wings rotted away. Phil Albee bought what was left in 2020 to have a cost-effective sportster that would fit in his small side hangar, albeit at the cost of some sweat equity. Albee had Paul Schlecker in Canada build and cover new wings using some of the original metal…