On Mon, 7 Feb 2005 18:14:33 -0800, "mindenpilot"
wrote:

Once more, I am not proposing anything pretty or elegant at first, just
something that will work.
Hell, a mini-MAX will work right now (aside from street-legal issues).
It will fly, the wings come off in 10 minutes, then you could taxi it.

Let's make it more elegant from there...

Motivation wise, you might consider an electric motor. Electric motors
have great torque all the way from the bottom so you could effectively
do away with a gearbox which would have been extra weight. For very
short distances, you could run it from the battery. Since you can't
afford the weight of a big battery pack, if you want to go a little
further, you would need to run the engine to keep it charged which
would mean you would need to be able to disconnect the prop. That
would either mean a clutch or perhaps removing the prop when you
remove the wings.

Something else that occurs to me is that the triangular arrangement of
the landing gear is (presumably) to somewhat absorb the impact of the
landing. Since this is not required on the road, you might want to be
able to widen the triangle to provide extra stability from a broader
wheelbase and a lower center of gravity. It might be possible to add
this without too much extra weight...

Rich

--
An animal so poor in spirit that he won't even fight on his own behalf
is already an evolutionary dead end; the best he can do for his breed
is crawl off and die, and not pass on his defective genes.
--R.A.Heinlein