Chapter 26 – Trick or Treat!

For the record, today fell into the TREAT category!

Why?

Well, yesterday I spent a fair amount of the day emailing back and forth with Dave and Lisa from Oregon Aero seats to work out all the info I needed to provide them to enable them to cut the front and rear seat cores for my Long-EZ.

As I mentioned in a previous post, I’m so far behind schedule that I’m not going to play around with trying to save a penny or a dime here and there by constructing my own seat cores.

What finalized my decision?

Well, I just went up to the DC area to pick up the last of some stuff I had stored at some friends’ house. On the way back I stopped off for the night at Marco and Gina’s (I haven’t seen both in a while, so it was a great –albeit brief– visit! I mean, between Gina’s phenomenal cooking and taking a hop in Marco’s awesome Long-EZ, it was a definitely a nice break!).

One thing that I asked Marco to do was to coordinate with Chris Cleaver to see if he was available to show me his newly upholstered seats. Moreover, I wanted to get a “butt test” in to try them out since he had a local guy do them for considerably less than Oregon Aero would cost. I have to say, they were beautiful seats on the upholstery side, but —FOR ME— the butt test left a lot to be desired. I really like the way the Oregon Aero seats feel over the one I tried in Chris’s bird.

So on the way home Monday I gave Oregon Aero a call to get the ball rolling.

The next day (yesterday) I started working some pic mods to show Oregon Aero my seat dimensions for both the front and rear seats.

Here I’ve repurposed one of the pics Dave from Oregon Aero sent me to show the various widths of my front seat.

I then snapped this shot to show the different widths at the forward area of the front seat.

Then came the front-to-back measurements for the front seat. Below is the thigh support and seat pan areas.

Below is the front seat back dimensions, which I tweaked a bit in my verbal description to Oregon Aero.

Here we have a gee wiz shot of the top front seat back height.

For the rear seat I just did a side-view line drawing that depicted both the profile dimensions and the widths.

Getting all the dimensions and formatting them to ensure Oregon Aero had the correct data really took up most of the day, but I’m glad I got it out of the way and have them now hard at work making up my seat foam cores!

After pulling the trigger today I should have the cores in hand between mid-to-late December. Yet another reason I wanted to get the ball rolling now since I figured it would take a few months to get the cores, test them, tweak any changes and send them back for mods and upholstery.

In addition, I’m having them make me up the armrests and the headrests.

Chapter 23 – Prop Spinner

As I mentioned previously in my post on Rough River, that while be-bopping around the flightline with Marco looking at all the various canards it hit me that the airplanes without spinners on the back end just looked unfinished. He agreed (he agrees with just about EVERYTHING I say… haha!)

Flyable? Certainly. Lacking something? Yep, that too.

Especially when looking at the aft end of a row of Long-EZ’s with Hershey Kiss style spinners, then seeing a bird without one. Naaahh, not the look for me.

I had thought about flying without a spinner for a while until I made up my mind on this issue, but my mind has definitely been impressed upon now that I want a spinner to finish out the look I want.

But then came the questions of what/where/who/how? … followed by how much? And when?

The style I prefer is the same as the spinner Marco has on N977JT. It looks almost exactly the same as the NTX pressure recovery spinner that James Redmon made a batch of, shown here:

Interestingly, I asked Terry Lamp –builder of Marco’s Long-EZ– if he made the spinner himself? Or did he buy it from James Redmon? …. Along with a comment I made of not knowing James made these spinners circa 15 years ago.

To my surprise, Terry stated that he bought the spinner for Marco’s plane from Ken Miller. Ahhh, I thought… that made sense since in the last couple of months Ken Miller had asked on FaceBook who all was interested in him making prop spinners again. I may be slow, but I can connect dots.

I planned on contacting Ken Miller as an option for my spinner upon my return from RR.

Another option I had in mind, Klaus at Lightspeed Engineering, was apparently no longer a real option since Mike Toomey reportedly grabbed the last aluminum spinner bulkhead, one of the last few spinners, and then had to fabricate his own flow guide by using the spinner as a mold [BTW, I’m not a big fan of the rounded flow guide that terminates near the prop extension shaft vs. the flow guides that contact and cover the flywheel as the NTX flow guide does above].

One option that could possibly have been a lot cheaper was to ask Mike Toomey to make me one. But then that would have still required the machining of an aluminum bulkhead (given he even had time to do it)… too much work with my project already so far behind due to this protracted 2-year move!

Upon my return from Rough River, I contacted Ken Miller via FaceBook and also reached out to Noe Ramirez down in Mexico (who used to work for either Klaus, or Dave Ronneberg… sorry, don’t remember which one) to inquiry about the possibility of getting a spinner made.

Well, Ken said he decided not to make them since Craig Catto had started making them… (something that Mike Toomey had mentioned at RR as well).

Strike 1.

Then Noe replied and said he could, but the price, especially for shipping, would be exorbitantly high.

Strike 2.

Then yesterday afternoon I had a good discussion with Craig Catto’s daughter Nicole regarding hershey kiss style prop spinners. Since I have a Hertzler Silver Bullet prop, Nicole said they could send me one unclear-coated since I would need to cut out the prop blade notches on the spinner myself, then clear coat it or paint it.

I asked for pics and she sent me these 2 pics below… stunning and exactly what I was looking for!

If you’re on the Long-EZ and Vari-Eze FaceBook page you may have noted that Craig Catto made a post on his prop spinners about 2 hours after my phone call. They had one on hand and had closed before I could ask my last couple of questions.

I had errands to run the next morning and by the time I called Nicole, some barbaric neanderthal that goes by the name Dave Anderson had swooped in and STOLE my prop spinner (haha!!). Nah, all is good since Dave has a flying Long-EZ and needed one now. But I did place my order with Nicole for one of these stunning prop spinners.

3rd times a charm!

I’m glad I ordered it now since I do NOT want to cover up the fantastic carbon fiber pattern with paint. I will now incorporate this black spinner into my paint scheme to allow for this carbon fiber beauty to be shown in all of its natural splendor!