NetHeads, You guys are soon going to regret egging me on about the "pilot reports". I couldn't fly to my father's farm today because of weather on his end, so the wife said "I'm sure you can still find someplace else to fly today", so off I went. One of the changes I made in the last few days was to make my static ports flush mounted, with nothing more than a 1/16" hole to the outside world, so I needed to check my indicated stall speed anyway. And I needed a little more shakedown on the new fiberglass spinner front bulkhead. What better way than a tour of the airport "neighborhood"? So I flew down to the Tennessee river, over the big bridge, and hung a left and flew up river to Guntersville, Scottsboro, Stevenson, Marion County, Jackson TN, Fayetteville TN, MDQ, and back to M38. That's eight airports and 17 landings.
After the first landing at Stevenson, a guy came on the radio and asked "is that KR pilot Bill Clapp, flying a Corvair?". I said "no, but if you want to talk Corvairs, I'll be back in two minutes". I was just impressed that anybody in Alabama would even know a KR when he saw one! The guy was building a Corvair for a Piet, and had one totally blasted engine that he'd bought first, then he got super lucky and bought an entire 1965 Corvair with a "new" 1969 engine in it. This thing looked brand new, and he hadn't even cleaned the parts yet! I spent some time bringing him up to speed on stuff like small block rockers and why he should keep his original ones (which he had thoughtfully wired into pairs with their balls, even though he was planning on throwing them away), preserving that pristine crank at all costs, and then headed on up river to the next stop. Three of the landings I did were basically tailwheel first, as I was trying to stretch the bottom of the envelope. Most observers would call it a three point landing, but the "boing" noise tells me the tail wheel hit first, and that always occured at about 63 mph (well, all three times according to the GPS, but you wouldn't believe me if I told you that). Maybe I can get around to extending my gear this week and do some comparisons next weekend (another excuse to fly). I'm thinking it will lower my three point landing speed a few mph. I even flew over Georgia a bit just to say I'd been there, and made it back home with 289.0 hours on the clock. Life is good... Mark Langford, Huntsville, Alabama see KR2S project N56ML at http://home.hiwaay.net/~langford email to N56ML "at" hiwaay.net --------------------------------------------------------------
