NetHeads, I'm done with the airbox, for now. There are things I'll do differently on the next go 'round, but I can fly with this one until then. Shockingly, it's made out of aluminum, rather than glass, but I figured it would be a lot easier to get the valves to work smoothly, since they would be based on flat surfaces with bent-up aluminum.. It turns out, the way I did it could have just as easily been glass. Ram air valve is a 3/16" diameter 4130 rod with stainless flapper plate welded to it, and carb heat valve is a long AN3 bolt with another flapper welded to it, all with O*lite bushings. Carb heat valve and ram air valve are both cable actuated, but next time I'll make the carb heat a weighted affair, so when ram air is on, carb heat will be off because the ram pressure and a little more weight will force it closed (it's on sintered bearings and flops around nicely), and when ram air is off, carb heat will automatically be on because the engine is sucking on it. I think it would work that way now, if I didn't have a cable connected to it, but I could tweak the design to make sure it worked as expected. I get smarter after I build something that's almost right!
The next one will be about an inch narrower too. This one is way too tight all the way around, requiring several miracles to make it work just right. For testing I won't even hook up the ram air, but will suck warm air from inside the cowling, with the option of really hot air from the heat muff, which is nothing more than some .025" aluminum rolled up and safety wired to the header, with a piece of homemade 304SS spring underneath. I hesitate to actually look, but I suspect my builder's log shows well over a hundred hours in the fabrication of this thing. I'll do a proper description of it later, after I'm flying. See the photo at http://home.hiwaay.net/~langford/corvair/airbox.jpg . So now I only have forty EIGHT things on my to-do-list before I fly, so don't even ask... Mark Langford ("that man that lives in the basement"), Harvest, Alabama see KR2S project N56ML at http://home.hiwaay.net/~langford email to N56ML "at" hiwaay.net --------------------------------------------------------------
