On Dec 8, 6:41*pm, Steve Koerner wrote:
BTW, I think Bob K knows more then he is telling us.

I think so too. * Bob's earlier speculation on the wing construction
matches precisely what I observed.

Tell us, please Bob.

Sorry to disappoint, but I'm pretty sure I've already told about as
much as I know. I think I've seen pictures of it in an old Soaring
magazine, maybe along with an old Homebuilders Hall article. But
looking through my copy of the Collected Works of Stan Hall, the
closes thing I can find is the Moba 2C, which is in Australia and
accounted for. It also dates to the late 1970s, probably too late to
be our mystery ship. I sure wish I could ask Stan about it, I'd be
pretty sure he'd know it.

What I think I recall of the pictures in Soaring showed a cross-
section of how the aluminum box spar was sized to fit into the
airfoil, and how the foam blocks were cut and nested onto the spar. I
probably saw the pictures around 1980 when I was working at Sky
Sailing and someone left us several cartons of old Soaring magazines
ranging from about 1960 to about 1977. If I was to start looking
through old Soarings, I'd start at 1967 and then widen the search both
ways.

If it seems odd that I identified the wing construction, please
understand that I've been interested in sailplane structures since
about as far back as I can remember clearly. Whenever I saw a picture
of something like that, I'd be all over it, figuring out how it could
be done, what the advantages are, what the disadvantages are. I know
just about every way there is to build a glider. I even know a few
pretty good ways.

Furthermore, I recall that there were several similar projects in the
late 1960s. It seems natural to want to combine predicable, well-
understood riveted aluminum primary structure with easily-shaped foam
and fiberglass secondary structure.

As for my quip about the pilot buying a Libelle, that was an offhand
remark based on two things: For one, it seems evident from the photos
that whatever incident placed that glider there was eminently
survivable, and the pilot probably walked away from it. For another,
my bet is that that glider, like too many homebuilt ships, was too
hard to assemble, too hard to disassemble, too hard to seal, and
probably embodied other disappointments as well. And it probably had a
lousy trailer. So when the pilot did walk away, he probably couldn't
face the idea of another disassembly and reassembly, so he just took
the instruments and left it there, vowing his next glider would go
together much more easily. The lesson there is probably that having a
good trailer is possibly more important than having a good glider.

As for having been involved in the construction, I'm flattered, but
I'm not quite that old. Guessing that that glider was built around
1967, I would have been four or five years old at the time.

Here's a list of all the people I'd ask for more information:

Fred Jiran
George Applebay
Jim Marske
Vern Oldershaw
Alex Sim

Thanks, and best regards to all

Bob K.
www.hpaircraft.com