Experimenter

April 2013

Experimenter is a magazine created by EAA for people who build airplanes. We will report on amateur-built aircraft as well as ultralights and other light aircraft.

Issue link: http://experimenter.epubxp.com/i/118927

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ing that one thing, which meant solving a lot of problems. It got to where I'd wake up in the middle of the night thinking of various ways of building something." George started with the simplest parts he could: the tail surfaces. "The tail ribs are truss types, which were fairly easy to build, but the spar has laminated caps and is routed: That's the first place I used the router on the airplane. Very quickly, it became the most used tool on the project. I continually found uses for it and built jigs and tracks to guide it." All wooden aircraft have the reputation of taking longer to build because there are so many pieces, both large and small, to be fabricated. George, however, explained why it takes so much time in another way. "Everything you do on a wooden airplane, especially one as sophisticated as the Falco, requires lots of tooling and fixtures. In fact, nearly every piece has to be built twice: first the tooling/fixtures, then the part. The fuselage frames, for instance, are laminated and have to be a specific shape, so you build a form for each of them. The fuselage has to be jigged on a fixture that holds everything in exact alignment while the skins are being glued in place. Some of the skins are compound curved, so you have to build a male mold to form the skin over. That molding process, by the way, was very rewarding, and I enjoyed doing it." George's tidy cockpit controls and instruments. Every airplane has its share of things that are difficult, and in the case of George's Falco, it was the flaps and ailerons. "The flaps and ailerons have to be exactly right. If they aren't perfectly straight you'll have problems rigging the airplane. For some reason, those on the left wing gave me real fits, and I had to build both the flaps and ailerons three times to get them right. "The canopy itself came from the kit manufacturer, Sequoia Aircraft, but I modified it by raking the windshield back and raising the canopy three inches for more headroom." Although the landing gear was available from the kit manufacturer, George did it in true homebuilder fashion and found parts that would work. "The main gear is off of a MS-893 Rallye. I cut it and modified it to fit and had a friend do the welding. I ordered a nose gear from Sequoia, but just about everything else in the airplane are standard parts that I cobbled together to get right. The gear, incidentally, is actuated by electrically driven jack screws." Photography by Jim Raeder Tis bird logo is George's reinvention of a Ferrari logo. Since the Falco is Italian in design and ofen called the Ferrari of light aircraf, he swapped out the horse for a Hawk (Falco in Italian) and added stars of the Southern Cross of the New Zealand fag. EAA Experimenter 13

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