Standard Pilot Blog

Tuesday, May 8, 2012

Steel Fuselages, Revisited

Please note: James' blog has moved to a Wordpress site. To access it, please visit http://jameswiebe.wordpress.com/. All posts have been transferred to the new site, and all new posts will only be accessible via Wordpress. Thank you for your interest!

Chromaloy steel is amazing. It used to be our only product offering -- but has been supplanted by aluminum due to substantially reduced costs in favor of aluminum. Most of the times, the customers vote for aluminum.

When the steel is built with thin wall 0.028 tubing, it is virtually identical to aluminum in weight.

Steel fuselages are very much still on our offering sheet. They're just expensive, relative to the aluminum option. We currently charge an upcharge of $2000 over the aluminum option, but this will be going up. It takes us 5 to 6 man weeks of welding and fabrication time to make the steel fuselages. Add in the cost of the steel, the welding supplies, and overhead, and they cost us a lot to make.

This particular steel fuselage is heading to the bay area in California.

I'm simply posting 20 or 25 photos of this particular fuselage, complete with front cabin dacron covering. It still needs some UV protection -- a little EkoFill to finish the job.

We build these in our factory jigs, which is why they turn out so square and lovely.

I weighed this particular fuselage before we covered it. It was 37 pounds.

Belite Ultralight Aircraft Steel Fuselage

Monday, May 7, 2012

Tricycle Gear Aluminum Plane

Tricycle Gear Ultralight from Belite, coming in to land (note film still on windshield)

Belite Ultralight Airplane, flaring to land

Powerful 45HP MZ201 engine on Belite Ultralight Aircraft

Belite aluminum tricycle gear ultralight airplane

Belite aluminum tricycle gear ultralight aircraft

Wednesday, April 25, 2012

My Mother has a Blog! And Russian Mennonites build an Ultralight Airplane! In 1907!

Please note: James' blog has moved to a Wordpress site. To access it, please visit http://jameswiebe.wordpress.com/. All posts have been transferred to the new site, and all new posts will only be accessible via Wordpress. Thank you for your interest!

Some of you know that my background is small town Mennonite (Hillsboro, KS), and a few of know that my mother is Katie Funk Wiebe, a retired but still prolific Mennonite author. Mom writes her own blog, Second Thoughts, and I like to think that I got a good measure of her writing DNA. I think the book count she's authored currently stands around 20ish. And she's not done yet!

While having lunch with her a couple of days ago, she let me look through an excellent book on Mennonites, and was kinda stunned to see a 1907 photograph of some Russian Mennonites, standing next to a Wright-esque airplane (glider) they had constructed. I have copied only a fuzzy photo, and leave it to you to surf to other websites which contain old historical information on this impressive Mennonite / Aviation accomplishment.

Imagine you are in Russia, 105 years ago, and you see this:

Wow. !!

It seems this is the HUP airplane project at Chortitza, with HUP standing for Hildebrand, Unruh, and Plenert.

Excerpting from an online article, found at http://www.mennonitehistorian.ca

...Launching a glider on the flat Russian steppes was as great a feat as designing and building one. The youths solved this by fitting HUP with skis to slide on grass and using two horses for launching power. A powerful stallion provided initial horsepower to overcome inertia and was then cut loose. An exceptionally fast mare continued at a dead gallop towing the machine sufficiently high into the air to glide blissfully around until speed loss and lift forced the pilot to land.

...The HUP Project at The boys' efforts didn't always meet with approval in an agriculturally-oriented community with strict religious standards where the "man with wings" philosophy also predominated. Nonetheless, their efforts invariably drew a crowd. Sometimes the young gliders capitalized on this by charging admission and occasionally an adult donated to the project.

...By 1907 the men, aged 17 to 20, felt they had sufficient experience, knowledge and finances to try building a real plane. They abandoned the glider and set to work designing and building HUP II. They planned and built the fourThe cost was so high that they couldn't afford wheels and once again had to rely on
skis....

You can read one of articles here.

Fuel Sender Installation in Plastic Tank

Please note: James' blog has moved to a Wordpress site. To access it, please visit http://jameswiebe.wordpress.com/. All posts have been transferred to the new site, and all new posts will only be accessible via Wordpress. Thank you for your interest!

Here's a quick way to get a fuel sender into any ultralight aircraft. We've done this with aluminum tanks, by welding a 'platform' onto the tank for the fuel sender, but it's quick and easy with an inexpensive 5 gallon tank from Walmart.

Here's how. Start with a fuel sender, which you can purchase from us or from Aircraft Spruce, which looks like this:


Fuel Sender

The fuel sender has three connections: power, ground (+12v), and fuel sender output (provides 0 to 5v to fuel gauge.)

Of course, you'll need a fuel gauge. Many different companies sell them. Ours features brilliant adjustable daylight readable LEDs, and minimal power consumption, and absolute lowest weight (less than one ounce). It looks like this:


fuel gauge from Belite

and it fits in any standard 2 1/4 inch instrument hole. All you need to do is attach ground, power, and attach the input to the fuel sender. (Use a 1 amp fuse when running power to the fuel gauge and the fuel sender.)

We also use a classic red 5 gallon tank from Walmart, and we drill a hole in the top for the fuel sender. (We also drill a hole for the fuel line 'bobber' to feed through.) The tank must be vented, and the 'slop' around the fuel line hole provides this venting.

It looks like this:


Fuel tank for ultralight with fuel sender hole drilled out.

We then place the fuel sender through the hole below the handle, and secure using five ordinary wood or deck screws. We don't use nuts/bolts, because they are way too hard to get the nuts into the tank. The gray material is a fuel tank sealer, which merely provides a gasket around the hole, to prevent fuel from sloshing out. You can get it at your hardware store.

One of the neat things about using this kind of tank is that if you use a quick release fitting on the fuel hose, you can swap one fuel tank for another in your ultralight airplane.

After installation, follow instructions with the fuel probe for setting the empty and full positions on the gauge.