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BEARHAWK, FINALLY! THE FOREVERHAWK IS DONE K ITPLANES November 2019 Hoses • Aircraft • Buzzing Accidents and Brakes Wheels • Test • Bearhawk LSA Sikaflex Bond • Dead-Stick Landing • Leak-Down Canopy Wings SubSonex Jet • Fabric ® SubSonex! Build Your Personal Jet FIBER ARTS What You Need to Know About Fabric NOVEMBER 2019 BEL VOIR PUBLICATIONS LESSONS IN BONDING In the Shop: Sikaflex Applied Right • Don’t Fear the Leak-Down Test • All About Hoses AVIONICS BUZZ • Maintaining Wheels & Brakes What We Heard at Oshkosh www.kitplanes.com ENJOY THE VIEW. EVERY TIME YOU FLY. G3X TOUCH™ SERIES FOR EXPERIMENTAL AIRCRAFT TOUCHSCREEN, INTEGRATION WITH ADS-B TARGETTREND™ SUPPORTS ANY MODERN AUTOPILOT COMPLETE KNOB AND COMMS, TRANSPONDER, TRAFFIC AND COMBINATION OF 10.6” WITH ACCLAIMED SYSTEM STARTING BUTTON CONTROL IFR GPS AND MORE SIRIUSXM® WEATHER* AND 7” DISPLAYS, UP TO 4 PERFORMANCE AT $4,495** FOR MORE DETAILS, VISIT GARMIN.COM/EXPERIMENTAL *Additional equipment required. **MSRP: 7” display and fl ight sensors. © 2019 Garmin Ltd. or its subsidiaries. 19-MCJT19630 G3X ENJOY_THE_VIEW Ad-7.875x10.5-Kitplanes.indd 1 3/12/19 8:45 AM NovemberCONTENTS 2019 | Volume 36, Number 11 Builder Spotlight 6 TURBINE TEMPTATION: Making the decision. By Paul Dye. 14 BUILDING THE BEARHAWK LSA: It’s finally finished! By Ken Scott. 18 AVIONICS AT AIRVENTURE 2019: A bit of innovation and some surprises. By Larry Anglisano. 22 FABRIC COVERING 101: Lessons learned applying fabric to a Murphy Maverick. By Dan Kerr. 28 SIKAFLEX CANOPY BOND: Tips for making The Big Cut and bonding a canopy. By Larry Larson. 14 36 ALTERNATOR MODS WITHOUT MAJOR SURGERY: Another way to modify a Nippondenso alternator for use with an external voltage regulator. By Graeme Coates. 40 HOMEBUILT ACCIDENTS—BUZZKILL: Crashes while maneuvering at low altitude have a high mortality rate. By Ron Wanttaja. 44 GROW A THIRD HAND: When you need an extra hand, make a jig. By Omar Filipovic. Shop Talk 46 MAINTENANCE MATTERS: Tires, brakes and wheel bearings. By Dave Prizio. 55 UNAIRWORTHY: Fuel leak and cracked flare. By Vic Syracuse. 58 BEST PRACTICES: Aircraft plumbing—flexible lines. By Dave Prizio. 64 HOME SHOP MACHINIST: RV quick stick. By Bob Hadley. 75 AERO ’LECTRICS: Tall transmission tales (antennas, chapter 3). By Jim Weir. Designer’s Notebook 72 WIND TUNNEL: Design process—landing gear, part 3. By Barnaby Wainfan. Exploring 2 EDITOR’S LOG: Notes from the heartland. By Marc Cook. 6 52 CHECKPOINTS: The 2-mile decision. By Vic Syracuse. 56 BUILDING TIME: Taxes and shipping additional. By Kerry Fores. 78 REAR COCKPIT: The big scare. By Tom Wilson. Kit Bits 4 LETTERS 67 LIST OF ADVERTISERS 68 BUILDERS’ MARKETPLACE 80 KIT STUFF: Drawing on experience. By cartoonist Robrucha. On the cover: Paul Dye flies his SubSonex personal jet over Lake Tahoe in the 28 Sierra Nevada. Photographed by Richard VanderMeulen. For subscription information, contact KITPLANES® at 800/622-1065 or visit www.kitplanes.com/cs. KITPLANES November 2019 1 EDITOR’S LOG Notes From the Heartland No surprise that my first trip back to Long-EZ in a magazine must have been TruTrak can help BendixKing gain some Oshkosh in years was a funny combina- truly invigorating. I have mad respect for traction among Experimentals. tion of beginner’s excitement and jaded Rutan as well as the builders who made Finally this: MOSAIC. There isn’t an journalist’s déjà vu. So much was basi- his imaginings into real aircraft, and you aviation journalist in the land who isn’t cally the same—and remember that I’ve can sense in his public talks a bit of frus- tired of reporting on or watching the been coming to the event off and on tration that today’s homebuilts are so craziness that’s stemmed from the since 1988—but there was enough that mature, so safe in their design choices. Boeing 737 MAX debacle. But the reper- was new to make this one of the best Moving on. Later in this issue, you’ll find cussions go further than inconveniences shows I’ve experienced in a long time. Larry Anglisano’s avionics report from in the summer air travel, with Southwest That said, the volume of raw news from AirVenture, which follows the theme of and American canceling flights as they this year’s AirVenture was more a trickle there being no seismic news. I am curi- worked without dozens of aircraft. than torrent. We’re in the phase of this ous about the acquisition of TruTrak by That’s not our concern. Ours is: The sport where the industry is mature and Honeywell to put it into the BendixKing FAA has been criticized for allowing there is one dominant design, the Van’s product family. I have seen small, agile Boeing to control too much of the cer- RV, at least in terms of pure volume. As companies purchased by mega-glom- tification process. The expectation is for the design of homebuilts have shifted erates with the idea of borrowing some the FAA to halt or even reverse any pro- from wild-eyed inventors truly trying on of that free-spirited, we-can-do-it inven- gram that might be seen as loosening its “something new” to well-established tiveness for the good of the whole. It’s hold on safety. I wouldn’t want to be the companies creating kits that just about not uncommon for the small company to FAA staffer standing up in a meeting say- anyone with a budget and persistence simply get subsumed into the larger cor- ing the agency should give the industry can complete, the sense of blunt innova- porate culture, but here’s to hoping that more rope. tion seems to have left us. This is much less an indictment of where Experimentals have landed than an observation of the homebuilding life cycle. Nowhere was this more evident to me than standing around Boeing Square. This year featured Burt Rutan speaking several times during the show and his designs featured prominently in the main display area. I’ve done enough fiberglass work—mainly on the Pulsar that I built in the 1990s but also, later, on my Sports- man—to fully appreciate the challenge of “inside-out” moldless construction. Rutan’s ability to imagine, design, build, and document wild forms set imagina- tions alight in the 1970s. If you were sit- ting in a smoke-filled FBO in the ‘70s, Huge props for those intrepid builders who created some of the earliest, most demanding- looking out at dowdy Cessnas and Pipers to-build Experimentals. Burt Rutan’s willingness to bust open orthodoxy helped fuel the on the ramp, the image of a VariEZE or movement, that’s for sure. Marc Cook is back as KITPLANES’ Editor in Chief after a hiatus playing with motorcycles and learning about e-commerce. A veteran special-interest journalist, Marc has built two airplanes, an Aero Designs Pulsar XP and a Glasair Aviation Sportsman. Both are on to new owners as he flies a shared Grumman Traveler in southern Rhode Island and considers what the next aircraft build Marc Cook will be. Marc has 4500 hours spread over 200-plus types and three decades of flying. 2 KITPLANES November 2019 www.kitplanes.com & www.facebook.com/kitplanes And yet that seems to be happening. At AirVenture outgoing FAA administrator Dan Elwell (and currently deputy admin under Steve Dickson) discussed MOSAIC in terms that surprised me. Specifically, that it wasn’t dead on arrival. In fact, the program is moving forward in meaning- ful if not specifically revealed ways. MOSAIC is a broad program to recast certification and approvals for non- commercial aircraft. It came as part of a plan to recast all of FAA Part 23 certifi- cation to be simpler (thus cheaper) and more reliable. Among the proposals in MOSAIC were an adjustment of the Light Sport Aircraft weight limit and a bump to four seats, to which I say, “Yay.” I was in this chair when LSA was announced, and it was clear the weight limit was both arbitrary and far too restrictive. I won’t suggest that the failure of the category to bring some 6000 new airframes into the world every year hinges on that, but the LSA limitations surely didn’t make life easy for the airframers. Any intelligent relaxation of those limits is a great thing. Other parts of MOSAIC include per- mitting non-builder owners of Experi- mental/Amateur-Built aircraft to take a course to allow them to conduct the annual condition inspection. And, according to the EAA, MOSAIC would look into ways to formalize a program to allow “custom building” of aircraft that are ostensibly E/A-B designs. I don’t doubt there will be a burble of anger from those following the current rules to the letter, but the reality is that the customer looking to have an airplane built is not the same customer deciding whether to get a slow-built or quickbuild version of a new RV. Other parts of MOSAIC include the possibility of install- ing non-certified components (mostly avionics) into production-line aircraft not used in commercial operations. I know most of you have heard all this before. Promises of big change, then the years go by. But the fact is that the FAA, even pushed along by EAA and AOPA, is not an agency that can move quickly. The fact that it hasn’t completely shut down MOSAIC in light of the 737 MAX traumas is good news for general aviation and our thriving part of it. J Photo: Marc Cook KITPLANES November 2019 3 LETTERS EDITORIAL Editor in Chief Marc Cook Winner’s Circle my KITPLANES® subscription through [email protected] What’s this I hear about Paul Dye the new interface way more than ever.