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Mr Whee was right!... lightening hole fuel tanks

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  • #16
    You are welcome you talk about any deviations here, I'm not intending to discourage that. Rather, I think you'll get more value if you are able to hear the answers you are getting, and I'm not sure that you are.
    The big windows are a great example. I'm speaking to you from the other side of that bridge. I can tell you first hand what it took to accomplish that relatively minor cosmetic change. When you are talking about building nose ribs out of weldable aluminum or widening the fuselage, it's like walking into a bridge builders venue and saying you're going to build a bridge across lake Michigan. Is it possible? Yes, of course, but are you sure you understand the scope of a project like that? When you see the eyebrows go up in that room, is it because the establishment is trying to stifle the new guy for proposing something other than the way they've always done it?
    Even when you don't deviate from the plans, you have a monumentally large project ahead of you. There are lots of people here who have been a little further down a very similar road. Indeed, you might come up with a breakthrough that everyone wants to replicate. We all want that to happen! That is what we are here for. But we also all want you to build a safe and effective airplane that does what you want it to do. We know from our personal experiences how it goes when a new idea that we thought was easy turned out to be so hard that backtracking was the only option. We have a sense of statistically how many ideas turned out to be good vs bad.
    Optimism and grit are crucial to completing this project, but they alone will not transcend the realities that make airplane design so difficult. You can start with a 4-seat airplane, curse the torpedoes and put two more seats in it, but it will not perform as well as any other Bearhawk. I'm not telling you this because I enjoy oppression of my fellow builder. I'm telling you this because for the last 5 years I've been loading four people and their baggage into the airplane and I have a real understanding of how big (small) the baggage area is, how it becomes filled with the stuff we like to travel with, how the weight and balance works out in a variety of loading conditions, and how the airplane flies in those conditions. If you don't want to believe me, come fly with me some time, and let's fly the airplane light and then heavy. Let's load the baggage area and see how quickly it fills up with even 4 people's stuff, before you take the baggage area away to make more room for seats. Let's do some math about the weight of our little 360-powered airplane that is 400 pounds lighter than the heaviest Bearhawks. Even though it is perhaps the most capable airplane in the world for its cost, it is still very limited as a transportation tool compared to a compact car or a King Air. But we love it because it's twice as fast as the car and 1/10th the cost of the Beech.
    Dream big! Change the world for the better! But if nothing else, please consider the advice to choose an airplane that will perform the mission you desire, or if there isn't one, conform your mission to the airplane you choose. Not for our benefit, but for yours.

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    • #17
      Very well said Jared. Over the years there have been quite a few attempts to improve on Bob's designs. Very few of these work out. And I am not talking about plexi on the doors etc.

      And I would like to say one more thing that perhaps might piss some posters on this forum off - spend as much time as possible in the shop and not on the computer. That is how planes get built. Mark

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      • #18
        As the A&P I work with likes to say, it's your experiment. The idea of adding fuel forward to act as ballast to shift cg is interesting, but since its being used as ballast you can't burn it and since its so close to the datum line you would have to add more weight than if you added something further forward, like maybe on the firewall. I guess it would be easy enough to calculate how much ballast would be needed at the firewall to equal the amount fo fuel you would put forward of the spar. I'm just thinking complexity vs reward. There are a lot of ideas that start off seeming like a great solution but with more research turn out to not be worth the effort. Maybe this one would work though, it is your experiment and as such you set a lot of the parameters yourself. Like gross weight, you could set it higher for operations when loaded with extra fuel for ballast and five pax and adjust your g load limits down over the design max weight so you aren't stressing the airframe and maybe have a max landing weight, etc.

        Good luck, I'm going to go fly my Patrol now.
        Rollie VanDorn
        Findlay, OH
        Patrol Quick Build

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