My First Glastar Condition Inspection

Having jumped into the deep end of the experimental pool with the purchase of my Glastar, this first condition inspection was a chance to get into the details of its construction. Fortunately, one of the premier Glastar fabricators moved from Florida to Knoxville TN, just across the mountains from me, and I arranged for him to come over to take a look at the innards with my old friend and mechanic, Keith, and me.

Zach Chase dug right into the project, beginning with the tail and working his way to the firewall; no need to go further as firewall forward is pretty straightforward airplane stuff.

Of course I was so wrapped up in the process that I didn't take any pictures, but Zach did. These pictures are looking forward at clearances for the elevator bellcrank bolts. 

These pictures show the machined tailskid which works against a spring to cushion any inadvertent tail strikes. Most builders just attached a piece of nylon block or a portion of tire tread to protect the tailcone; Russ went way beyond that with a very nice piece of work.

Suffice to say it was money well spent to have Zach come over and I followed up by buying some removable seat pan inserts to facilitate next year's inspection. Pictures next year, maybe.

The inspection was our first chance to see every little thing about the airplane and it's past. Now I know for certain what I have and I'm ready to fly some trips.

Wednesday's lunch with the lads was a shrimp boil this time and my fellow conspirators brought side dishes, libations and good cheer to the hangar. Always welcome, good cheer.

The Fourth of July weekend is coming up - time to set aside some time to reflect and absorb just what the date means and strike a blow for liberty by going flying!

Socially distant, the old fashioned way

It was reasonably warm by 10:30 yesterday morning so I decided “What the hay?” and trundled out to the airport. There were a couple of airplanes flying so I opened up the hangar and chatted a few minutes with an old timer about this and that. 

Looking northward along Runway 33, Johnson Field

Rolled the CallAir out after checking the oil and fuel drains (my engine doesn’t use oil much at all), attached the tail tie down and she started on the second pull of the prop. Being almost a direct crosswind from the SW, I elected to depart on 33 at Johnson Field. What a day! Crosswinds from the SW make for some exclamations near the north end of the field but the mighty Continental (Powerful as the Nation) pulled us through and we bounced our way through an overhead departure to the northeast and around the Valley of the Old French Broad. Well, not exactly. It was more like the Valley of the Old Clear Creek. 

Clear Creek, or something like it, from Google Earth. Sugarloaf VOR at right.

It didn’t take long to have enough fun for one day, so with the skies now empty, bounced back to a left downwind entry to 15 at Johnson .. whereupon the rollers over Barker Heights really rolled and the geese on the runway tried downwind takeoffs toward 0A7 with some comical panic but I landed past them in an amazing, beautiful wheel landing that, of course, nobody witnessed but me. 

Since you weren’t around to sit in the hangar and marvel at my prowess or be regaled by my description of it, I thought “why deny my friends”.......

It was too chilly and lonely for a celebratory beer (reminiscent of Saturday’s breakfast when landscaping duties and fallen trees decimated the ranks) so I packed it in and returned to chores aplenty, always pending, sometimes done.

Hendersonville NC. Home of the Fairweather Flyers

Airplane For Sale

It's official .. the CallAir is for sale.

I love this airplane and it's for that reason I'm letting it go .. there are just not enough hours in the day or square feet in the hangar for me to justify keeping it, only to let it sit on the ground far too much.

A little history.

The design for my CallAir was put on paper as the world was on the verge of World War II, starting as a project for Interstate Engineering, a company in El Segundo CA engaged in the design and manufacture of aircraft components. When the U.S. government published a request for bids for training airplanes for the Civilian Pilot Training Program, Interstate hired Ted Woolsey to put a team together to design and offer such an airplane. They were in competition with established manufacturers, primarily Taylorcraft, Aeronca, Piper, and Stinson. 

On the ground with my friend Steve's Interstate Cadet

Interstate built and sold some 300+ Cadets, mostly to flying schools for the CPTP. Piper and others claim to have given most of the pilots in WWII their primary training, but in reality their "Cubs" had become a generic term for all similar light planes and Interstate Cadets certainly trained their fair share. As it happened, there were a lot of mishaps too. The Call Aircraft Company in Afton WY employed its mechanics to repair a number of those broken machines. (Mr. Reuel Call had a fleet of trucks from his other businesses ready to work, picking up bent airplanes from all over the western states to be flown out after repair). 

The sturdy construction of the Cadet had caught Call's eye, leading to the eventual acquisition of the type certificates for both of the Cadet and the later, military L-6 and plans to put the Cadet back in production. They built two - one as an Interstate that was written off a long time ago and this one as a CallAir. On this one they put a 90 HP Continental engine for performance in the thin mountain air at Afton WY (over 6,000' MSL).

The owners before me were two families in Black Mountain NC - they passed the airplane back and forth between them for 55 years. When the patriarch of the family died I bought their "Jezebel" in 2012.

We held a family reunion picnic for the previous owners

When I bought the airplane in 2012 it had been idle in the family hangar for a long time. The engine had just been overhauled and a new prop put on so they could sell it as a flying airplane.

My first look at the CallAir Cadet

I flew the airplane for a little over a year before deciding to enter a full restoration project. 

At a fly-in breakfast

Little did I know what the job might entail. What began as a job that might take a few months turned into 3 1/2 years.

Stripped down to the bare bones, November 2013

A key contact turned out to be a fellow named Tim Talen in Oregon. Tim has restored some prize winning Cadets and knew of my airplane but had never actually seen it. He has been a lot of help all through the project, working from pictures exchanged online. He is also a good source for parts, which are interchangeable between the CallAir and the Interstate.

One thing we didn't know was the color scheme. Luckily, a retired USAF General once worked at the CallAir plant as a teenager and had a picture of his favorite airplane still hanging on his wall !

1952

2017

As taildraggers go, this one is pretty tame. The tailwheel is steerable. I added some length to my taildragger-dragger to accommodate the inset.

The weight on the tailwheel is only 80 pounds or so and it's easy to move.

As for flying, the airplane is a piece of cake, very stable and honest. It was quite a selling point in the 1940s that the airplane could be flown without a lot of attention to rudder. (until you start a turn - it demonstrates adverse yaw quite well).

It's a nice looking bird coming and going .. the wing dihedral makes for great inflight stability

Landings are straightforward. The huge vertical tail is, again, stabilizing. 

I'm advertising in various media at $55,000 (NEWS FLASH - I've lowered the price to $45,000 - 2/20/21), or about half what I have in it. For that you have an almost new 1952 airplane and a classic. (or you can spend a cool couple hundred thou for a new Cub). If it doesn't sell for that, it's going to a museum.

Performance numbers:

Aircraft empty weight:           869 pounds
Max Gross Takeoff Weight: 1250 pounds
Fuel capacity: 15 Gallons
Airfoil: NACA 23012 (same as T-craft)
Max Speed @ Sea Level: 112 MPH 
Cruising Speed:                105 MPH
Landing Speed:                  38 MPH

Aircraft and original engine total time: about 1750 hours (I'm still flying it)

C-90-8 Engine time since major overhaul is a bit over 110 hours. Same on the prop - new at engine overhaul.

Some restoration features:

Marvel-Schebler carburetor with mixture control 
Cleveland Wheels and Brakes, new 7.00x6 tires 
PolyFiber process cover (PolyTone finish) 
Instruments rebuilt by Keystone
Bendix Magnetos rebuilt 
Brackett Air Filter
All new windshield and windows 
All new interior with shoulder harnesses

My contact info:

Alex Nelon
828-595-5950 (text preferred or leave message, I don't answer unknown numbers)
Airplane is located at Hendersonville NC

Flying in the Face of the Pandemic

I don't know about you, but this Coronavirus thing would be a lot more painful if it were not for the fact that 99% of my flying is solo. It's nice to have another soul to talk to, especially when it's a new experience for them, but I do enjoy wifferdilling along, watching the world go by and marveling at the peace and harmony of it from up to a couple of thousand feet in the air. The CallAir is perfect for that.

 

Whether ridge soaring when the wind is up or just poking around the mountains when the winds are calm, the CallAir lets me get a good long look at the landscape

I've reluctantly made the decision to sell the CallAir. It's a wonderful airplane, made better by a museum quality (expensive) restoration from 2013-2017, but I'm not flying it enough to justify keeping it on the payroll. The ad is on Barnstormers.com if you know anybody looking for a great buy.

For actually going places, the GlaStar is lurking in the back of the hangar .. no inflight pictures of it yet, but it's itching to fly more. In this era of viruses floating around, I don't see myself ever getting on another airliner and with my family in the South, I don't have to; they're all within striking distance in the 'Star.

For now, flying solo, flying safely ... mowing the grass, etc. A Fair Weather Flyer, for sure.

Air Filters, Paint Schemes, New Friends - the GlaStar adventure continues

I shoulda taken a picture. The niggling thought in the back of my head was that the air filter in my induction system probably needed closer inspection than we gave it last July when I bought the GlaStar ... the airplane had been sitting for a dozen years or so and things tend to deteriorate over that amount of time. Having flown it home from Indiana and a bit since, Mark and I found a few warmish days to pull the cowlings and go into the induction air filter box that is built into the right side of the GlaStar engine compartment.

The one on the left is like the one that came with the airplane; the one on the right is like the new K&N. I had to find a picture of a semi-goopy old style one - mine was much worse. 

The filter was a mess. The type used by the builder was the standard recommendation by Stoddard-Hamilton at the time; a circular wire cage around which was wrapped an oil-treated foam filter. It had gotten pretty goopy over the years. The foam dissolved, more or less, and there was that thick, sludgy oil left clinging to everything inside the filter box. I'm sure bits of this had been sucked into the engine and burned/exhausted. The decision was whether I wanted to go back with that same filter or use another by K&N, a reputable outfit in California that has been custom fitting filters for the automotive community for a long time. I went with K&N.

Now on to the paint scheme and colors ...

I fell in love with this airplane 15+ years ago at a Florida fly-in. The paint scheme is very unique - designed by a fellow named Leon Yoder in Indiana, the design was created using masks and the accents were painted on. The colors matched the palette for a 2002 VW Beetle - a car owned by the airplane builder at the time. Everyone who sees it today is in awe of the quality of workmanship. 

Another new friend is a fellow who built his GlaStar at the same time as mine. Don finished his first in 2001; Russ finished mine in 2002. Having a machinist and a tool&die maker working together at the same time made for some very practical and significant improvements over the construction manual way of doing things. One example is the nosewheel fairing:

The original nosewheel fairing is split longitudinally .. there's no room for a screwdriver to fit under the front of the fairing to install or remove the fairing to replace or add air to a tire, for example.

Don came up with a design that splits the fairing into a front and back half, making it easy to install and remove. Russ did the same.

Another example of Don's quest for the perfect GlaStar is the upper and lower cowling attachment system. The standard design uses a piano hinge on the inside of the cowling halves with a long wire pin that holds them together, same as on an RV airplane. The wire in the standard instructions runs from the forward lip of the cowling to the firewall and uses various ways of securing the pin so it doesn't back out and damage the prop. Don saw another builder's idea of inserting the pin from the cockpit and running it into position from there to the forward lip of the cowling. Russ did the same. I should mention that Don won a "Lindy" award for workmanship at Oshkosh for his completed GlaStar and pictures are beautiful.

So that's the story for March. As I'm writing, the Coronavirus pandemic is sweeping around the world and many events are being cancelled to keep people home and away from crowds. The Sun-n-Fun show at Lakeland FL has been postponed until May in hopes the infection will run its course by then [NEWS FLASH - Sun-n-Fun was cancelled this year, as was Oshkosh later on]. In the meantime, I fly now and then and enjoy polishing and tweaking and planning places to go and people to see. Hopefully non-contagious ones.

Oh Spring, 2020, Wherefore Art Thou?

We see signs on the field:

The winter has been wet and unusually warm on average. Looking north-ish along RW 33, the bog is especially hard on landing gear with spats and mushy as well. It's easy to dig into the soft ground. 

So we stay home. Comfy, relatively dry. The hangar leaks a bit here and there (to be fixed when Mark gets back from accumulating enough travel diseases to incapacitate the Fairweather Flyers plus some.

In spite of Mama Nature, there are a few dry days strung together .. enough to bring out the machines and aviate. 

Last weekend's foray was to a  private grass strip just South (always capitalized) of here, beyond our protective mountains, where an engaging fellow gives tailwheel transition instruction in a beautiful Cessna 140 and it was worth the visit. There are new subdivisions being built around the airstrip - I hope they can hold on to it.

Meanwhile, the Fairweather Flyers fly on .. searching for signs of spring wherever they can be found.

Steve's RV-10 First Flight, Leo's Loon-y, etc

It's official ... Steve's RV-10 is not only an airplane (the paperwork is done), it flies!

Darwin and Steve did the first flight test on the 30th of January, just in time to miss the first snow of the year (One day's worth, mostly gone a couple of days later. After all, this is North Carolina. South enough). All was well and good data collected to tweak Steve's high tech fuel/engine setup. More on that some other time.

Leo's Corby Starlet is now the flagship of the Fairweather Flyers fleet ... Loon is proudly flying into the wind on his rudder surfaces.

Yesterday's snow that began in late morning didn't quash Leo's desire to fly -- he made it back to the airport in time to miss the real action. The weather guessers missed it across the board and it was a real surprise.

I managed to get the Glastar out for a short flight around the valley on Thursday ... Mark and Steve did some high engineering math and found a way for me to rearrange the hangar stack so I could pull it out and put it back in without a lot of trouble. (Mark is traveling for awhile so I have the run of the place.) Not trusting one good result from my ADS-B performance flight, I took advantage of Thursday's to pull up another report from FAA and it was good. 

Another hour on another day in the Glastar to see what it's like to be bashed around with the winds we get here in the mountains .. a short run over to a close by airport beyond the rim of these hills and an exercise in crosswind landings. All in all, good for me and good to get the airplane outside in the elements.

There are more hours of light than yesterday ... more time to go FLYING !

It's Official -- I'm ADS-B Compliant!

My friendlies know the struggle to find an ADS-B solution that won't break the bank. When Dick G suggested the uAvionix SkyFX/Echo UAT option it filled the bill perfectly. Dick has a command of electricity that surpasses mine (a low threshold, for sure) and came up with a very neat installation for the GlaStar. We did have to drill one hole in the belly for the "out" antenna, but that's unobtrusive and was accompanied by a soft, thick foil ground plane that was molded to fit the interior fiberglass belly skin and bonded in place.

The trick is to tweak the setup for a particular installation. FAA wants to take a look at every installation from the standpoint of the ground stations that monitor and process all that ADS-B data, so performance tests have to be conducted, either on the ground or in flight. In my case, the first two test flights showed a "baro alt" fault, fortunately the only red-highlighted box on the FAA's ADS-B performance report.

uAvionix has a double secret page on the setup program that has to be accessed when the system is powered up and the operator's tablet computer or phone is logged in via the system wi-fi. In my case, I had to adjust the "Transponder Monitor Threshold" a bit ... kinda like tuning a radio dial in your '57 Chevy. Once tuned, my performance report was clean - no red boxes.

So now I can fly to exotic places with Class B or C airspace with impunity. Just because I can.

Meanwhile ... half the runway is submerged after 5+" of rain in the last couple of days. Into every life, etc etc etc

Santa Brought Me a New Airplane Tug!

Boy oh Boy oh Boy ... I can move my Glastar with ease now!

Thanks and a tip of the hat to Mark, Dick R, Darwin and Leo

When it comes right down to it, there's nothing that can beat having good friends who like to tinker with stuff and don't give up until it works!

There were several iterations of the nosewheel tug for the Glastar. Because the wheel contacts the ground some 7-ish inches behind the nosewheel pivot point, moving the airplane backward is a real chore. Couple that with soft ground in front of the hangar and the result is the nosewheel whips from side to side with corresponding tail swings that can quickly lead to damage once in the hangar's tight space. It was clear something had to be done to minimize that problem. 

One proposed fix:

Found a mobility scooter on Craigslist and stripped it down

This really held some promise in my mind, but I'm a theatre major and had very little to go on .. the one thing I wanted to see was whether or not the scooter could be modified to accept the nosewheel on some kind of platform and, at the same time, bring the pivot point close to alignment with that of the airplane. It didn't work, at least the way we tried it. I'm reconditioning the scooter and will either sell or donate it as a scooter.

Now, at last, the problem is solved, the need fulfilled, just in time to move the airplane in and out of the hangar for the ADS-B performance flights. Three of those are in the books, some more tweaking on the setup and I think we'll be good to go with that.

It's enough to make a fellow want to go flying!

The Prop is Balanced .. And the Tug is Online (almost)! What a Difference!

I Love my Glastar. Everyone I talk to about the airplane knows that. We're in the tweaking stage of new ownership of an experimental airplane. Among the early projects were items that I expected of a machine that was stored for more than 10 years ... tires, battery, wheel bearings, an oil and filter change. Items yet to be addressed include replacement of seals and O rings that dried out during the storage as well as updates for avionics, including ADS-B and backup instruments. The list is not particularly long, nor is it particularly short; storage is just not kind to airplanes, whether in a museum or in a hangar in northern Indiana.

One item high on my list for tweaking was the prop balance. Glastars, particularly those pulled by Lycoming engines on dynafocal mounts, have been known to develop cracks in their exhaust systems from engine vibration. Probably any airplane type similarly equipped should be watched by their owner, but I noticed in the web resources provided by the Glasair Owners Association that Glastars were singled out. My local CFI friend who gave me my initial insurance checkout mentioned an unusual amount of vibration and recommended I have it looked at by an experienced balance specialist, so I did.

There are 2 story lines that will eventually come up in this post: the prop balance and a new tug that Mark designed and built for me.

Look at the engine and you'll see a yellow laser gizmo that focuses on a tape that's applied to the back of the #1 prop blade. The blue tape indexes a protractor.

As best I can describe it, the prop goes round and round and the laser blips and a motion sensor/accelerometer records how far out of whack the balance is. The info is fed into a handheld device that tells us what's wrong and what needs to be done. Weights are then added to the spinner or the starter ring gear at computed angles to counter the out of whack-ness and things get smooth. What else is there to know?

Thanks to friend Dick who did the balancing job. It really made a difference.

Now for the tug. We started with Mark's tug, which he designed and built and has been in use for almost 2 years. A second one, redesigned, is in the works:

Mark is a mechanical engineer and a retired one at that who has time to think about things and how to make them better. In his mental perambulations, he happened upon the idea that a worm gear drive might fit what we were trying to build, so he did a lot of research and somehow came across a fellow who had a garden implement - a rototiller - with a worm drive of substantial construction and that lit a light bulb. The rototiller had a broken whatzit but the worm gear transmission was the thing, so Mark bought it. After a couple of fits and starts, we learned that the worm drive is meant to go one way only -- when we tried to run it in reverse, the worm drive disengaged. Back to the drawing board.

Rototillers take a beating in their intended use - for our purposes the transmission would have been on permanent holiday, but it didn't work.

Darwin provided the needed welding to make the whole thing come together.

The dadgum thing looked great, but looks aren't everything. 

The early beta test illustrated a huge benefit: it was a lot easier to pull my smooth running Glastar out of the hangar and put it back in.

No fear. Inquiring minds are on the job. One suggestion was to just go out and buy a tug that is in production, but what's the fun in that? 

I can't believe I missed September

Well, here we are in October already and I wonder where last month went! To tell the truth, it was a blur ... heat and home projects have a way of interfering with airplane fun and there was enough of both those things to keep me busy.

The really cool thing for September was the discovery of a new (to me) gadget for adding AHRS, ADSB-IN, GPS and iPad interface to both airplanes ... it's a portable box with a couple of rabbit ear antennae and it runs off rechargable battery packs. Nifty neat-o. For under $250 I can see the same information in my non-electrical system CallAir that the company used to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to see in the Gulfstreams I flew:

The next thing that had to be done was a leg-stretching flight to see how the Glastar performs on a representative trip, the likes of which I have been fantasizing for years. Friend George was the target audience and we met after an hour and a half hop from the mountains to the low country of South Carolina. Lunch at a fish camp was perfect, the ambiance and denizens at the bar stools just perfect, the guy tuning his electric guitar for the evening show was temporarily perfect and the trip, as it turned out, gave me a really satisfying glimpse of many such trips in my future. The only question that came up was why I was seeing a ghost airplane trailing me all the way down and back .. my nifty neat-o portable avionic will have to be tweaked a bit.

The CallAir and I made a couple of valley runs to see if anything was new .. I love flying that airplane, but I really do want to sell it to un-cramp the hangar space.

So that's the news for September 2019 from The Valley of the Old French Broad (River) ..