Morning all. I'm almost finished with the recovering job on my old Easy 2 trainer, which thus far is going very well. As I stated in earlier post. I'm giving this plane to my father inlaw. The plane has the stock EVO 40 engine. It takes alot of runway to get it airborne. Was wondering what your thoughts were on getting more torque/speed out of the 40 to allow my father inlaw to get off the ground a little faster. Running a 10X7 prop on it at the moment. One other thing I noticed is the front of the plane sits a tad lower than the rear. I think if I extend the front landing gear a tad, angling the nose up a little might help get it off the ground a little faster as well. Or I could just drop a 46 in it and be done. Open to all suggetions.
Thanks

Morning, Bill.

You know, we have a few guys in our club that are flying rather large trainer type planes with rather small engines. One guy flys a Sig Seniorita with an OS 32 engine and no ailerons. It takes time to get going, but it flys. Oddly enough, the last time I flew it with him, I had trouble flying the thing because of the rudder-only operation.. it was just not as responsive as I expected and it took me a few orbits to get it right... I wanted to fly the thing like I do my Skylark 70.. different animal, for sure.

Anyway, one big problem we encounter at our field is that it's grass and it takes a lot to get the thing rolling. I started using those foam large size wheels.. they are light weight and seem to help by getting the prop higher (away from the grass in other words) and easier to roll on the grass surface. Not that this is the issue here, but just something that I did (many others do it too..) to help overcome a take-off problem on grass surfaces.

On my NexStar, the roll was long, but I understand what you are saying with a long roll to get airborne.. like the Sig Seniorita was. I don't know if raising the front (thus the leading edge of the wing) will help, but it can't hurt to try. I'm sure all the aerodynamics majors will chime in here shortly..

Then there is always the larger engine. You might try a prop with a shorter pitch to get more power, but that reduces the speed which may be an issue. I guess it depends on how much you want to spend to get this airplane airborne. If it were me, I'd just give in and put a good .46 on board and be done with it.

CGr.

Try the nose gear first. If that doesn't help, go with the 46