Hi Strykass,
Thank you for your kind word about the design. I keep wanting to take the concept and build an EDF around it, maybe one of these days I'll get to it.
As to engines, I would probably go with the OS46, mostly because you can find a pusher prop that will work with it, I am not sure that you could with the larger engines, and as you stated the rear exhaust would be a bit of a problem.
The retracts that I used where made by Carl Goldberg. I do not think that they are made any longer. Today I would use a set of Spring Airs or equivalent. Move them as far forward as possible, and mount them so that the wheel is in the same location when extended.
I felt that the canard worked fairly well. It was small enough and far enough forward that its down wash should not have effected the wing much.
I never had any over heating problems with the engine. On the ground the prop would pull enough air through to keep it cool, and one in the air there was plenty of air.
The model shown in the photos above was my number 2 bird, which was the one in the articale. The number 1 bird flew for about one year before I made a few changes to the design and built a new one.
These days I work on cruise missile designs at Lockheed Martin. All though I am supposed to be a Flight Performance Engineer I do more Guidance and Control software development than anything else these days. The current program I work on is the worlds smallest cruise missile, LOCAAS. I have been working on it from its beginning. Prior to working on missiles I did a lot of aircraft conceptual design work for Air Force and Navy programs.
Steven
ORIGINAL: Strykaas
Hello Steve,
It's a real pleasure for me to talk with the designer of the planes I used to discover in french RC magazines when I was a child, more than 10 years ago
. So first, indeed, congrats for this quite unusual and very nice looking design ! A real winner. Second, I plan building one soon this year. I have the plans translated in French by MRA, a french mag. By the way, I still have to choose the engine. I have the following engines Webra .50 / OS46SF / MVVS .49 (rear exhaust) / Irvine .53. Is there any you would advocate ? I guess the rear exhaut one is not well suited for obvious reason, otherwise I will have to severely re-engineer the back of the fuse. What do you think ? As far as the retracts are concerned, which brand did you use ? Their design is unusual and I can't find the same. I will perhaps go for pneumatics if I can't find such retracts. Any suggestion ? And the canards. To what extent are they efficient ? I find this feature very nice, but on some other designs (e.g. Arrow by Laddie Mikulasko) they were totally useless, if not harmful, i.e. they were blanking off the control surfaces at the rear... The canards are here very small and far from the back of the aircraft, so I'm pretty confident. Other question : any overheating issues with the engine installed like this ? Was the tuned pipe really efficient in this configuration ?
Was it your first prototype pictured above ?
Too bad this aircraft hasn't been kitted, you would have seen many many more
...
Last, It was stated in my magazine that you have an aeronautical engineer background. On which projects did you work ? Just curiosity. Personaly, I have worked on the Rafale for several years.
Cheers.