Category: Everything Else

By request, here’s a breakdown of the technical and cost differences to equip my Sling 4 with a Rotax 915iS engine instead of the Rotax 914UL engine. As a quick reminder of why I’m doing this: +26HP at takeoff power (5800 RPM), +35HP at max continuous power (5500 RPM),...

I prefer controls that provide visual cues of their current setting. I have a minor in Human Factors from my undergraduate days, and one of my professors was quite passionate about aircraft. As a result, I really don’t like using up/down toggles that are so commonly used on experimental...

I posted a video on YouTube recently with an early demonstration of the my heating system. Everything is functioning the way I expect so far, and I’m continuing to work on the software. I’m quite impressed with how much air it can move. Here’s a link to the video,...

14 November, 2020 I recently had the honor to attend the big homecoming celebration for my friends and their newly-completed Sling 4! A huge achievement for Craig & Ellen, who have been looking forward to this day for 6 1/2 years! Before landing Craig did a little fly-by so...

It’s pretty exciting dreaming up a concept, turning it into a design, and then having a working prototype in your hands, all in the course of a few weeks. I recently watched a video about the new Diamond DA50 RG, a 4-to-5 place retractable gear single engine airplane that’s...

I’ve completed the preliminary design of my automatic heater system. I’ve been concentrating on this for the last few weeks, which is why I haven’t posted much progress on the plane itself. This system recovers the heat from the engine’s cylinder head water cooling loop, forces air over a...

The next big step is to attach the canopy to the fuselage. For that task, I needed some supplies to seal the canopy. The factory recommends products made by Sika, which are a bit hard to find here in the US. I found that they are carried by some...

Over the weekend I started preparing the port-side outer fuselage skin for installation. There are a few steps to do before installing it: Lightly abrade the skin near rivet locations (for better paint adhesion under the countersunk rivet head) Dimple the forward rivet locations Attach NACA duct Roll edges...

I’ve learned a few things as I tried to install countersunk rivets on my fuselage, which I’m capturing in this post. In summary, the rivets I originally started using (POP AK41H and AK51H) are not suitable for use on the fuselage, but I found an alternative part that’s readily...

EDIT 8/5/2020: the AK51H rivets identified below won’t work. See my later post regarding countersunk rivets. In my part 2 post regarding the fuselage side skin install, I noted that the TSi instructs you to use 4.0mm rivets to attach the skin in the dimpled locations, rather than 3.2mm...