Let's Roll
We are nearing the end of February and the weather is slowly improving. I’ve managed to put 2.5 hours on the plane a couple weekends ago. My three landings were pretty good, so at least I’m not getting too rusty. Hoping the weather in March gets to over 50F and less choppy air. I am already looking at flight planning the trip down to SNF 2024 in early April. Gonna give myself a couple days to get there - so will need a good stretch of weather. Fingers crossed! Worst case scenario is to trailer it down last minute again. I’ve sworn not to put the plane thru that again - the roads are terrible. Mother nature may have her own plans so will have to be flexible.
Aaron wants me to put the wheel pants and spats on the gear legs to see how it improves the cruise and fuel burn. Will try to do that in March if there is time. The leg fairings will likely improve the drag more than the wheel pants would. We have the wheel pants and mounting brackets ready to go, but not the spats.
Scott is finishing up the Rudder redesign after doing some time critical contract work. We are planning to build the first article starting at the end of February - this week. It will go together fairly quickly in our jig and we will post pics. Our current plan is to make several for display in our booth at Sun N Fun. We will be creating a work cell to fabricate the rudders and will make ten of these in the Beta variant. There will likely be no changes for the Std kit version of the tail after these are made so we can likely keep making more. The horizontal and vertical stabilizers are 95% ready so we may have a set of those ready for SNF aswell. We have to finish the controls and rear fuselage interface models and make any adjustments first.
The airfoils for the tail have been changed to be slimmer at the root ribs and tighter leading edge radius. Idea is reducing drag from the prototype’s empanage. We also changed the rudder structure and shape a little. Very much more like the real P-40/36 rudder structure - less ribs, but similar in all aspects. The aerodynamic counter balance shape is changed from the simplified version we had on the prototype. Because we can and it isn’t adding any more complexity. We are more accurate to scale this way at very little cost delta. We will be doing some minor changes throughout the airframe to make it more to scale when it makes sense to. Such as: the fuselage will get rounded off on the bottom and the wing root fillets will hit the fuselage more accurately.
This week we start building our own P-40 Warhawk! Lets Roll!
