Greeley to Sydney

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I took a flight in the LongEZ with my friend Kyle today from Greeley to Sidney, NE and back. Cabela’s is located within a mile from the field and they come out to pick you up with a free shuttle. It only took about 36 minutes to get there, and Kyle was impressed. We hit speeds of over 180 mph on the way thanks to a 20 mph tailwind. The crosswinds at Sidney were pretty lively, 18 kts. gusting to 30 kts. and not exactly down the runway, more like at right angles to it. But we were able to land safely and without too much trouble. He generally drives there about once a year and it takes over 2 and a half hours each way when you drive there.

We ran into my friend Rick Gardner from Greeley there. It’s a small world indeed. He was there giving a seminar on fishing. He’s a professional walleye fisherman with lots of sponsors who provide him with some fancy equipment. We had a nice lunch, resisted much temptation in buying lots of things, and then returned home.

The shuttle driver told us that Cabela’s will be building a 200,000 sq. ft. store in Denver next year. It should be a beauty if it’s anything like the one they have in Sidney.

Engine performance

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I was helping my friend, Dan, last week to put some finishing touches on his Varieze after he rebuilt its engine. The Varieze is the Rutan-designed airplane that was the predecessor to the LongEZ that I fly. Dan had the plane down for several months having the cylinders bored, honed, ported, and replacing the pistons and rings with brand new high compression pistons and rings. He also made a number of other improvements on the airframe during that time. One of the goals was to get more horsepower and with it, higher top end speed. The engine had been using a lot of oil, about a quart every hour or two, so a top-end rebuild wasn’t an option, but a necessity.

The Varieze is no slouch on top end speed to begin with and there is one highly modified version of the Varieze that regularly turns in speeds over 240 mph at the Reno air races each year. Dan had already performed the break-in procedure on the engine the previous day and test flew the airplane. We took off from Loveland, expecting to fly for about 10 minutes and land in Greeley. No sooner did we leave the ground, that I could tell that Dan’s efforts had paid off. He was a mile ahead of me in no time at all. I let him know how far ahead he had gotten and he circled around and came up along side me. He passed me like I was standing still even though I was going 160 mph at the time! His groundspeed was over 200 mph and he wasn’t even at full throttle. He pulled up into a nearly vertical climb to slow down. After leveling off with the thottle pulled way back, Dan got on the radio and said, “Lee, I have a problem”. “What kind of problem?”, I asked. “Vibration” was his answer. We were about 6 miles out from the Greeley airport and I asked him if he could make it. He told me he’d try and I told him not to worry about the radio, I’d make the calls. Luckily, no one else was landing at the time and we were able to land straight in on the east runway. It was a tense few minutes but he managed to put it on the runway safely and taxied it over to my hangar.

I pulled up behind him to see a lot of smoke rising from his cowling and oil pouring out of the bottom of the plane. It was a very good thing that we had been only a few miles from the airport. He had lost about 4 of the 5 quarts of oil in the engine due to a very large hole you can see in the photo. (You can click on the images to see larger versions.). A connecting rod had come loose from the crankshaft and got knocked through the engine’s case and the engine cowling. Some of the parts that came off the engine went through the propellor and chewed it up pretty badly, but fortunately, it stayed together. Otherwise, it might not have been possible to get to the aiport. The engine was still running, albeit roughly, on three cylinders. On Saturday, we removed the wings and loaded it on a trailer for the trip back to Loveland. I expect that this time the rebuild may go a little faster, but he’ll have a lot more parts to buy. He still has to determine the root cause of the failure so that it won’t happen again.

We are very thankful that he was able to land safely and not damage the airframe or himself in the process!

EAA Chapter 1117 Website

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Finally, the weekend has arrived. I managed to get the local chapter EAA newsletter out this week, but just barely made it. I try to get it out on time to notify the others in the group about the upcoming monthly meeting and thanks to the fact that most of them now have email, I can do it with less lead time than when I mailed each one out via postal mail. I feel like I’m writing it to myself sometimes since I’m not even sure it’s being read by others in our little EAA Chapter 1117 Website. I’ve thought of keeping some of the newsletters on-line, but can’t justify the space for old newsletters so I only keep the latest one. Writing a newsletter is a lonely business and judging by the number of folks who have abstained from volunteering to take over the job in the past 6 years I’ve had it, not a very sought-after role either. 🙂

I updated my guest book today so it’s not quite so generic, but am still waiting for my first entry.

APRS trackers

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UPDATE 2013-01-13: This was the first blog entry I ever made. It was over 11 years ago when I first wrote this and I just wanted to go back and add this comment to it. I was using Blogger at the time. Over the past year, I’ve added permanent APRS trackers to my car and plane. After a few experiments on my bicycle, I found that it was impractical since it was too hard to hit the repeater.

I’ve been trying to get my APRS tracker up and running and so I spent a lot of time on the Internet looking for ideas and help. My goal is to have a tracker for all of my vehicles which includes my LongEZ, Durango, and even my bicycle. It would be nice if the trackers would come on automatically so I’m not even aware of them. That wouldn’t necessarily be the case on the bicycle, of course, since I’d like to use the same radio to talk when I’m not beaconing out my coordinates. But I’d like to keep the FT100 free in the Durango so I’ll have to find another radio to do the transmitting on the APRS frequency. In the case of the bicycle I’ll have to splice in a headset and PTT for that setup. I’m thinking of using the FT50 handheld in the plane and the bicycle. The GPS in the plane is a Garmin XL95 and it’s always installed, so I’ll use that as the positional data source. I have a Garmin eMap for the bicycle along with a handlebar mount for it. Getting the connectors has been a real pain. I found the Garmin connector in an unlikely place and it looks like the elusive 4 ring plug for the FT50 is available from Mouser (just look for p/n 171-7435).

Although I have a PIC-E, I’ve decided to use the TinyTrak by Byonics. It’s just smaller and easier to program and it’s much less expensive to duplicate ($30 per unit) and they go together very fast. I like the TinyTrakII even better and I’ve decided to upgrade to it. I’ll post more details later…