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planejaw,
My 50cc Revolver is due to arrive on the 30th of Jan and one of my big concerns has been the pits pipes exiting the cowl. I see what you did for your 55 RA. I am going to use the 55 side exhaust with the Jtec pipe. Thinking of removing enough from the side, or make holes to access the header bolts to remove and reinstall the exhaust after the cowl is in place. I DONT want to cut the pipes short if I have anything to do with it. Do you think this is possible without making a mess of the cowl?
I also see the extra port you made right in front of the cylinder head. Extra cooling is always a good thing and I will consider doing the same.
Even though my Revolver will arrive tomorrow, I am out of town and will not return until this weekend. And even then I will not have time to barely look at it.
Also, since I already have three other Revolvers and know about the landing gear issue, I will be doing a little work there. Since they already pined the LG block as I already do, I will also be installing a metal strip across the 4 bolts tieing the two gear together. But I still may be installing a doubbler on the firewal to tie the gear block to the firewal at it's weakest point. The cowl ring will be in the way some so this will be limited so not to interfear with that. Other than that I will not make any other changes to this Revolver other than the hardware they supply.
Actually the engine in my Revolver is a DA-50 and it has the side-mounted, inverted Pitts muffler via J-Tec. It's the "P-47" style that has a narrower and angled manifold that comes off the engine's exhaust port, so you do not have to cut up the cowl on the port side. My son and I both left our exhaust tubes intact and just cut the fiberglass cowl opening and the cowl-ring to allow the cowl to slide easily backward. And, in reality, since there is so much air-inlet area, it's actually better to have the bottom of the cowl opened up. As a rule of thumb, you should have three-times the air-exit area as you do for incoming air. Some of the cylinder does stick out into the airflow, but not a great amount, which is why I opened up an air-inlet slot in front of the cylinder. Don't forget to reinforce the cowl-to-cowl-ring joint, which appears to be lightly glued. some 30-minute epoxy and wolven fiberglass tape should do the trick for you.
Regarding the landing gear, I previously had a GP 50cc Yak 54 and found the landing gear mount was quite poorly built and at one point, I replaced the stock mount with a piece of 1/2" plywood. That helped some, but the underlying and supporting structure was where the weaknesses are. I quickly found out that wheel-landings, not three-pointers, were the best way to give the landing gear a long-life. The revolver gear mounts appear to be installed differently and reinforced unlike the Yak's was. Again, avoid any kind of "plopping-down" type of full-stall landings.