We’re all looking for more speed, right? Well, below are my results regarding my speed increase from home-made wheel fairings and also a little bit of elbow grease.
Background: N6399U, Revmaster 2100D, RAF48 airfoil, 100% plans built, Sterba 54x54, empty weight 636 lbs. I have always had wheel pants, but they only covered the tires themselves, and not the brake lines, bolts, etc. on the landing gear strut that produce drag during flight. Two days ago, I removed my wheel pants, so I could construct wheel fairings, covering up those drag producing components. While building them, I decided to do a short “study” (if you would even call it that) on how the different components contributed to my cruising speed. Without the pants, and a fairly dirty airplane, I averaged ~105 knots, verified with my IPad. I flew one direction, then did a 180 and took the average of the two ground speeds. Not “exact”, but close enough for government work. 3150 RPM, 2500’ MSL, OAT ~50F. I then tried the wheel pants only, my typical configuration, and it brought the speed up to 108 knots, a 3 knot increase. Once they were finished and good enough for testing, adding my new wheel fairings resulted in a 1-2 knot increase, increasing the speed to 109-110 knots. And finally, after CLEANING the filthy, disgusting bug guts, spiders webs, oil, and grease from the plane. I am pleased to announce my speed increase went up even more, and I was averaging 112-113 knots; a 3 knot increase just from cleaning the plane alone! This is probably common knowledge to everyone on here, but I wanted to give an idea of just how much the wheel pants, fairings, and cleaning really can improve our performance. Going from 105 to 112-113 knots is a decent little increase considering all it took was about 7-8 hours of work (between several days) to completely construct wheel fairings with fiberglass, and about 2 hours to clean the plane head to toe. In short: Pants ~ 3 knots Fairings ~ 1-2 knots Cleaning ~ 3 knots. If nothing else, I was a little pumped today when I went out flying, and noticed just how much faster I was cruising, encouraging me to post on here. Thanks for reading! Sam _______________________________________________ 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
