Tabla de contenidos para April 2025 en KITPLANES

IT STARTED SIMPLY ENOUGH. With a mistake. OK, maybe just a misapplication of learned behavior. I’ll back up a couple of steps to explain. Roughly a year ago, in the midst of a comprehensive instrument-panel rework in my GlaStar, I’d decided to apply a lesson taught to me by my Sportsman way back in, oh, 2008. Then, I’d finished a similar panel rework and decided I would act like the pros—prime and paint everything before I put it back together and, surely, enjoy the shiny fruits of my labor soon after. If only. The whole mess got into the airplane and, in part because I was prototyping some components, panel sections and avionics were in and out so often it was almost impossible to keep the finishes nice. No amount…

TWO HOURS’ DRIVE east from Prague, across rolling green countryside and along poppy lined roads, lies Vysoke Myto, a quiet Czech town that is home to the production facilities for JMB Aircraft. For 20 years, the factory has produced the VL3, a sporty and fast two-seat retractable with a composite airframe, generating hundreds of airplanes that fly mostly in Europe. Purchased by Jean-Marie Guisset in 2012, the Belgian company’s development has centered on refining the airframe design and its production facilities. JMB improved the efficiency of the wing and refined the interior and avionics, while marrying the airframe to ever more sophisticated and powerful Rotax engines. These changes turned a niche airplane into a serious two-person cross-country machine. In fact, JMB boasts a nonstop westbound crossing in a VL3 between…

LAST MONTH, Hangar 32 had a special visitor. After not seeing him in person in over 20 years, my guest was Mehrdad Mehranpour (or “Amoojan” as I used to call him), who is an RV-7 and two-time RV-14 builder and, small world, a very old friend of my mom’s. After recently catching up over dinner, my parents got to talking about airplanes and they filled him in on what I was doing—flight instructing, flying an RV-14 and rebuilding an RV-6. He offered to come look at my RV to provide some expert advice. He brought his borescope, a tool we haven’t really used much recently. Together, we focused on our most recent dilemma—the holes in the rear spars of my wings where the aileron pushrods go through. As Kerry noted…

AS I SAID LAST MONTH at the start of the “Eating the Elephant” series, this isn’t a series about how to drill holes or hold a Cleco plier. It’s a guide, from an experienced builder, about how to think about the build and, perhaps, offer ways to push through actual and perceived roadblocks. Because they’re inevitable in every build. Probably like you, I hate backing up, turning around and undoing things that I had to work hard to do in the first place. It seems like a waste of effort, maybe a little bit of an admission that you made a mistake or forgot something. But when you build an airplane, it’s just a part of the process. That’s true whatever the material—metal, composites, tube and fabric. No matter what…

TAXI TESTING STARTS WITH runs at low and then moderate speed. Once these are successfully completed, the testing moves to higher speeds. Careful planning is vital as the target speed approaches rotation speed. Once the airplane exceeds stall speed, it can generate enough lift to take off. As weight transfers from wheels to wings, things can change very quickly and the pilot must be well prepared. It’s particularly important to have a clearly planned sequence of actions at target speed and to be alert to ensure the airplane does not exceed the target speed for each run. High-Speed Taxi Options The amount of runway needed to accelerate to condition, test and then safely stop increases with the square of the speed. As the runs get faster, runway length becomes critical.…

ANY PILOT WHO has been flying for a few years has run into this situation: You cancel a trip for some reason—weather, most often—and as things develop, it turns out that you probably could have flown as you had planned. We tend to look at these situations and say, “Well that was a bad decision. I got that one wrong.” But this is absolutely not the right way to think about it. If you made a decision based on your own “go/no-go” criteria and the information that you had at the time you made the decision didn’t meet the “go” criteria, then your decision was a good one, regardless of how the day eventually turned out. A decision that turns out later to be incorrect isn’t a “bad” one, so…

I SAW MY FIRST 3D PRINTER in a shop setting about five or six years ago. My initial impression was that it was a) a toy and b) too small to be of much use. But the guys in that shop were a bunch of smart dudes, so I figured there might be something to this 3D printing craze. I’m always open to trying new technology in the shop, even if half the time it doesn’t really pan out (I’m not sure my Shaper Origin CNC manual router will ever make it into an article, I use it so little). So I did my research and settled on a Prusa MK3S+ additive printer. It was around $800 and required assembly. I liked the assembly option so I could get an…

WITH HOMEBUILT PLANES, we are often left to make decisions about design, aesthetics or component selection with very little guidance. Many will say if it worked before, then it will work again, but with little data to back it up. Others will recommend that you buy the whizbang-shiny-gold-anodized thing in the catalog and tell you airplanes aren’t cheap. That second explanation seems more popular these days as homebuilts transition from the hot-rod-minded bluecollar style of Bernard Pietenpol and Burt Rutan to highly capable machines using many expensive, certified parts. It reminds me of when people say, “Oil changes are cheap, so why not change the oil [too] often?” I don’t know where you’re getting your oil and filters but I never understood that logic either. Let’s get back to the…

ONE OF THE KEY SKILLS needed in building an aircraft is organization. With the long lead times from some of the various kit providers, organization is something you can get started on prior to the kit arrival. Inventorying everything is certainly one of the first things you will do when the kit or kits arrive. But even more important is to decide on how and where you are going to store them. You want to ensure that they are stored in an organized manner, as well as in an area to prevent any possible damage. If this is your first aircraft project, it is also a good time to get educated on the various specialty tools you might need and start the procurement process. Some of you, me included, fall…

UNLIKELY AS IT SEEMS, I may be one of those giving procrastination a bad name. Certainly it’s one of my core competencies; ask anyone at the magazine involved in the production of this column. In moments of introspection this can lead to guilt, and guilt leads to defeat, and when working on airplanes—especially building a kit airplane—score enough defeats and the plane never flies. Or the airplane might fly but short of what it could be. And with that cheery thought we’re standing at the rear of my Starduster Too contemplating a sagging tailwheel spring. It’s an apologetically small threeleaf arrangement and its flattened arch tattletales an overload by the six-cylinder engine, three-bladed metal prop and a wall-to-wall crushed blue velour French cat house interior with gold metal flake trim.…

THERE IS SOMETHING proportionally humorous about an airplane that you are taller standing next to than when you’re sitting in the cockpit. Your basic “I’m going to trust my life to your wings, if I don’t trip over them first” incongruity. Yet some of the smallest aircraft have the potential to be the most endearing. The first few that come to mind are the Cassutt Racer, the Flying Flea, the Hawk 6 and Mew Gull (if you love diving into the history of rare British/European aircraft) or in this case the Baby Lakes. Better known as the Oldfield Baby Great Lakes, it was designed and first built by Barney Oldfield in the 1950s as a scaled-down homebuilder variation of the Great Lakes Sport Trainer. Oldfield had no relation to the…

IN THE OCTOBER 2023 issue of KITPLANES my article “Out of the Shadows” appeared, in which I contemplated how my RV-8A was then a counterbalance to my wife’s medical issues. Lisa had gone to Oasis of Hope in Mexico in 2020 for three weeks of cancer treatment. This was for triple negative breast cancer, which she was diagnosed with on Nov. 7, 2019. That article ended well. The rest of the story does not. Lisa was a pilot, though she only flew as PIC one time before having our first child (she was pregnant with him as she was working on her certificate). She helped with the RV construction as she could, but that became more limited as one, then two, then three kids came into our world. It may…

HOMEBUILDERS HAVE ALWAYS liked unusual configurations. The delta wing was hot in the early ’60s, with Convair’s F-102 Delta Dagger and F-106 Delta Dart, as well as the Saab Draken. John Dyke started with the JD-1, which first flew in 1962. A fire from a welding accident a few years later led to the improved Delta JD-2, completed in 1966 and marketed in plans form. The Dyke Delta uses an unusual mix of construction methods. Welded steel tube for structure, with a fiberglass covering on top and fabric below. The wings quickly fold over the fuselage. A local friend kept his in a hangar with a Volksplane and a KR-2. A four-seater, but it lacked conventionality there, too: The pilot sat in a single command chair up front, with a…

IF YOU HAVE BUILT or are almost finished building a kit aircraft, you should stop and ponder the incredible position in life you have achieved. By this I mean that you have committed to an undertaking that demands a vast range of skills and talents to reach the final goal of flying an object through the sky—one that you built with your hands. There are two distinct avenues of skills being utilized here. The first are those needed for building a complex machine. And the second are those needed for learning to fly while earning a pilot certificate. There are pilots and there are aircraft builders, and in many cases the same person achieves both goals. This means that these individuals have mastered an incredibly diverse set of skills that…

NO PROJECT IS A STRAIGHT LINE from-Step 1 to Step 527 or, for that matter, Step 1 to Step 2. There can be enough left unsaid to fritter away an hour solving the “how?” portion of a step. If you’ve ever tried to introduce a nut to a bolt in a space too small for your hand, you know what I mean. If you haven’t, you will. When I was still too young to use the phrase “When I was young…,” Popular Mechanics magazine ran the Roy Doty cartoon Wordless Workshop. Without a single written word it depicted a pipesmoking man-of-the-house solving household problems to his wife’s and young son’s unbridled joy. I’m adapting that idea to this column, banking on the axiom that photos are worth 1000 words. (I’ve…