South Africa   Land of sunshine

  This page is dedicated to all those who live to fly, are too poor to afford it and too proud to beg.
 

Himself

So nothing goes as planned and that is why a year after I started working on this project I am still not in the air. After these photographs were taken I found that the ignition system was rather suspect, so that was replaced with a normal VW distributor body of which the rotor arm was shortened by 8 mm,  the rotor was also shortened by 8 mm to take a Renault 5 distributor cap. This cap has the leads going out the side and not the top, the inside dia. between the lead points are also the right distance and the cap fits perfectly on the VW distributor. The result of all this was that it would protrude 30 mm above the upper cowling. To rectify this, an aerodynamic blister with a 90 mm radius at the front and a total height of 40 mm was made and molded into a cut out in the cowling (looks very nice and from the pilot seat it is behind the compass so it can not be seen. Passengers  view don't count.) It was later found that the compass did a bit of a dance when the instrument panel was closed so the compass was moved to the center beam of the canopy where the dance was less. A weight and balance exercise was done on Saturday 17/01/98. I have found that the aircraft was more of a basket case than I thought. That is the reason why the schedule could not be kept to as well as $$$.
 

 The cooling ducting of the engine was removed and completely remodeled  out of .5 mm stainless.

    The first ground run when I thought all the work was done. !!!!!!!!!

A hump on the top cowling developed to accommodate the distributor cap.

      As can be seen in the top right picture, a 50 mm hole in the right side of the lower cowling was made for ram air to the carb air intake.

    The stick was shortened and an armrest fitted between the sling seats.

The gull wing canopy from the back.

Making aircraft noises. The compass on top of the instrument panel has since been moved to the top of the canopy frame to eliminate interference from the instruments.

Last update 02 April 2000