David Stacchini wrote:
> It looks really promising, but I’m nervous about an airplane that has
been
> in an accident. How hard is it to inspect the wing spars for “hidden”
> damage?
Dave, I have personal knowledge of that plane, and I would not worry
about it for a second. What happened is that Jim added ram air to the
carb, but with an unvented float bowl, the way it worked out is that the
increased pressure in the carb throat as the plane gained speed
prevented fuel from leaving the float bowl (at least that was our
theory) and the engine quit as he was turning downwind. It was running
fine before this, and it was running fine after the ram air was
disconnected. Problem is that it was a one-way runway at the time due
to very tall trees on one end, and only 2600' of length, so he had no
choice but to come in over the trees and try to get it down. He went
off the end of the runway, into a farm field, and was almost stopped
when he got to a shallow drainage ditch. He described it as a slow
flip....almost balanced, but luck was that it went all the way over and
broke the tail. I would not sweat the spars at all, as they should not
have experienced anything that they weren't already designed for, and
and knowing Jim and how he did the tail extension splicing (which made
it a KR2S), I'd fly it in a heartbeat and not sweat it. It also has the
new tail airfoil and longer horizontal stab, and I believe the vertical
stab is taller.
The place that might sustain and show obvious damage to the spars would
be at the wing attach fittings, and those are easily inspected with the
wings off. Other damage is unlikely (judging by the test to failure
that we did at a Gathering a while back) would be the spar facings
ripping apart, but that would be clearly visible as huge rips in the
fiberglass skin. The spars can bend a huge distance before that
happens, so it would be very obvious.
There's a lot more on Jim Hill's plane at
http://www.n56ml.com/jhill.html .
Mark Langford
m...@n56ml.com
http://www.n56ml.com
Huntsville, AL
_______________________________________________
Search the KRnet Archives at https://www.mail-archive.com/krnet@list.krnet.org/.
Please see LIST RULES and KRnet info at http://www.krnet.org/info.html.
see http://list.krnet.org/mailman/listinfo/krnet_list.krnet.org to change
options.
To UNsubscribe from KRnet, send a message to krnet-le...@list.krnet.org
