Experimenter

DEC 2014

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.

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EAA Experimenter 19 it was designed for aerobatics, and that really appealed to Randy. He said, "The wing is essentially the same as the two- place, side-by-side Emeraude that Claude Piel had designed earlier, except that it is a bit shorter and slightly beefed up. The fuselage, however, is totally dif erent in every way." What he's referring to is that, besides featuring tandem seating, the wood fuselage of the Emeraude was replaced by a conventional steel tubing truss unit in the Beryl like so many other aerobatic airplanes. Randy said, "Claude Piel was a professional engineer and didn't give too much thought to the limited aircraft building experience the builders of the airplane would have. The Emeraude was designed in the early 1950s, the Beryl in the '60s, so the homebuilding movement was still quite young. Claude approached the airplane as he would any other professional airplane design, so some parts of it are—if not difficult for an amateur to do—at the very least challenging and/or time consuming. "The fuselage, for instance, is not a conventional tubing box like a Pitts or Skybolt where you build the sides flat and then stand them up to put the crosstubes in. The firewall sta- tion is square, but from there back, the fuselage is trapezoi- dal and sweeps up. So you build the top of the fuselage first, then construct a three-dimensional jig that holds the bottom two longerons in the right place and start putting in the side tubing. The side trusses have few 90-degree crosspieces. It's a Warren truss, so most side pieces are running at angles in the shape of warped W's, and because the wing runs through the bottom of the fuselage, rather than attaching on either side, there is a big discontinuity in that area. Further com- plicating things is that the bottom truss is highly unusual and irregular plus the longerons aren't one piece. They are multiple pieces of different sizes getting smaller as they go back where the strength isn't needed. The Lycoming 0-320E2D was a totally disassembled basket case that Randy found on Barnstormers.com. In the course of rebuilding the engine, Randy added a Silver Hawk fuel-injection unit and a Christen inverted oil system. The aileron balance weights hang out into the wind.

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