havent been on line in awhile as the gee bee modifications have occupied most of my time lately.

it is assembled and waiting for me to decide what engine to use --was planing on using 30cc poulan but have found a score in the cylinder plating(down hill from here)may use the 46cc poulan thats for my scratch built mulligan(verry detailed at 23lbs)

things i like about the gee bee
1-fuselage is fantastic--
2-all glass work is verry good!
3-fit of parts pretty good

things i dont like
1-not enough ribs in wing
2 piss poor sanding job on wing
3-landing gear blocks are wrongly placed for max strengh
4-wing should be fully sheeted.
5-tail wheel design is not right--could lead to broken rudder/post and striped servo gears.
6-if i glued aileron hinges in in factory slots the would be at an angle that would have caused the aileron reversal to be worse.
7-decals are wrong size and not complete(like the missing hill bros streamliners)
mods i did.(1/2 pound gain in weight)
1-load carring flying wires--wheel pants have added structure and lower wire loads are carried by the wheel pants.
fuse has added structure to carry upper wire loads
wire atatch point on wing--not as strong as i would like on the front wires as there is no rib or internal structure in this area so the loads are carried by the planking
the rear wire attach point is through trailing edge and is better.
not real pleased with wing wire attach points but all i could do without uncovering wing.
these mods should still add 50% to the g-loads that wing can handle.
2-landing gear atachment method was changed to allow failure at this point instead of destroying wing(mabey)
3-tail wheel set up replaced by propper sprung unit.
4-wing to fuse joiner replaced(front half of center ribs)with 5 ply aircraft ply wood--this also carries lower wire loads.
5-rudder control horn mounted internal and set up to correct linkage geometry problem(dont want rudder differential!)
6-firewall will be moddified(beefed up)once i decide what engine to use
7-used real hinges on all surfaces(dubro 1/4 scale)
8-added wheel pant to tail wheel

facts on full size r1/r2 super sporters(read henry haffkeys book on gee bees)
1-first flight was made with no verticle fin(i have picture of this version)test flight showed it needed a little more fin/rudder and this was added the next day

2- dolittles original remarks do not indicate that it was any harder to fly than anyother race plane or fighter of the day.
his later coments on how bad it was were aparently to make him self look more like a hero.

3- the moments and area ratios of the super sporters were about the same as all of the race planes using the wasp.

4- these aircraft r1/r2 --one was damaged on roll out after landing-short grass runway-the othe was damaged on take off almost imediatly after because the pilot was pissed at other pilot for damaging first one and he jerked it off the ground and stalled it.these 2 aircraft were built into the long tail r1-r2 and was damaged on testflight landing(short grass runway agin)
5-have read delmar benjamans(builder/owner/pilot of fullsize replica)flight report on the r-2 and the main problem is aileron reversal at low speed high angle of attack--the most comon cause of this is that the downward movement of the aleron causes that wing to stall first causing that wing to drop
the cure for this is wash out and aileron diferential
the wash out can be set with the flying wires or by warping the wings and reshrinking the covering
##### aileron diff can be done with the linkage geometry real easy and should save everyone lots of grief!######you want more up aileron than down

bottom line--nice airplane for the $$

wish-that we could buy unbuilt wing kit or kit with unbuilt wing with double the rib count(atleast) and ready to apply covering so that those of us who need a stronger more scale wing can do it our way!


David