Texas Parasol Plans...

Morgans wrote:

Do how do these plans look? Does everything look like it would work, now?

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Dear Jim,

The drawings Richard posted are the same garbage he was flogging for
$80 a copy four years ago. The cabanes and the carry-throughs for the
LG & struts appear to be for a fuselage that is 24" wide whereas the
fuselage as shown is only 22". The drawings do not contain enough data
to develop the angles of either the axle-carrier cluster or the rear LG
'gooseneck' where it attaches to the carry-throughs. The LG yoke does
not match the hole locations shown for its attachment to the front
carry-through and if the carry-throughs are attached as shown then
either the location for the landing gear attachment OR the strut
attachment will be in error since doing it one way violates the rule
for edge-distance whilst doing it the other requires re-locating the
carry-through... which throws out the locations for all of the other
structural members in that portion of the fuselage.

The point here is that Richard's statement about flying a plane built
from those drawings is pure Texas bull****. He built an airplane and
it flew but when the errors became evident and several of us asked him
to provide various dimensions from that airplane he simply refused to
do so. Rather curious behavior for the 'designer' of an airplane,
don't you think?

Work it out for yourself, Jim. Take your yo-yo and a piecea cardboard
and simply lay-out the forward carry-through. The errors are immediate
obvious and on the surface, don't look too serious. Now try resolving
them. You've got the point where the carry-thrus attach to the lower
longerons and that's pretty much fixed because you've already
fabricated the side-frames. Now you've got to accommodate the LG yoke,
the landing gear leg and the strut attachment. That's where you'll run
into conflict, espeically so if you've already drilled the
carry-throughs... which are now junk because the holes are in the wrong
locations. (Along with those four cabanes, if you bent them according
to the plans.)

So what are you going to move? The fasteners for the landing gear legs
must ALIGN between the front & rear carry-throughs, otherwise the legs
won't pivot. But the flanges of the forward carry-throughs are NOT
parallel to each other because of the curvature of the lower longeron
-- you'll run out of edge-distance before you get the legs to align
WITHOUT interference with either the longeron or the strut-end. Adjust
any one of the errors to fit and the result will create a conflict with
the other two points of attachment. And we're looking at some
significant loads here; forward wing strut, forward landing gear leg,
all of which goes into the carry-throughs then into the longeron
attachment. You wanna GUESS at the dimesions? Because that's what it
boils down to.

This is all simple geometry, Jim, right there in front of you on the
drawings. Richard finally admitted that he more-or-less built the
landing gear in-place, which means he KNEW the drawings were bull****.
So what did he change? What were the dimensions of the finished
structure? And that's where he goes all coy and sez he'll leave it up
to you to figure out. Now isn't that cute.

Will it fly? Of course it will fly! Lookit how many 'Chuck Birds' are
already flying. But the plans Richard drew up simply don't make sense
and he's obviously incapable of correcting them.

Designer my ass.

-R.S.Hoover