Hey Guys;
Some of you may recall that I was ready to bring my project back to the airport last summer when I posted the following video.
Unfortunately due to a bad forest fire season that forced the relocation of another water-bomber base to my local airport which was already busy with our own base, there simply was not any room for me not to mention the fact they would likely not have had much patience for my test flying with the constant airtanker traffic.
So what to do... well at about 1 minute into the above video you can see how easily my little nose wheel gets stuck in a minor soft spot on the lawn. This confirmed my long held belief that I'd built the wrong plane for me, but what to do about it now...?
So I got rid of the damn little wheel and put an even smaller one way back at the other end, then not satisfied with that I put a set of 22' Tundra tires up front where they belong! The following video shows the new RV9.
I did make a few tweaks etc. on the engine, but it's largely unchanged from last year. But despite not being run since last summer, it fired up like I'd ran it yesterday.
I also added a small hydraulic landing gear pump and ran all the lines down to the wheels to operate a set of retractable wheel skis that I'm currently working on for next winter.
While I was at it, I decided it was time for a new look, so I removed much of the old vinyl and bought a small desktop vinyl cutter and did all the graphics too. Of particular interest to the group though, would be this graphic
Quite a few years ago there was a T-shirt discussion here on the group and a few designs were proposed. I believe that this design was drawn by George Lendich from down under back in 2010.
He had submitted the design to CafePress and I'd actually bought a couple. I couldn't find the image file so I took a screenshot from the CafePress website as it's still there, then turned it into a vector graphic, which I could use with my vinyl cutter.
So if anybody else would like the image file for this, i'd be happy to share it. Of coarse maybe we should ask George, but it seems he made his last post here back in late 2010.
Heck I'd even cut some decals and send for free to anybody that wants one for their own project.
Todd Bartrim (got to learn to fly a taildragger now)
C-FSTB
RV9 no more "a"
Turbo13B