On Feb 25, 10:58 pm, flybynightkarmarepair wrote:

I've since heard from Veeduber (who knew Pazmany, and flew out of the
same airport as the prototype) that you could smell the first ship
before you could see it, as it burned, errr flew off the first 40
hours with the belts constantly slipping.
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Well... mebbe it wasn't quite that bad... :-) But with multiple vee
belts it's impossible to keep ALL of them at the same tension. The
loosest of them would slip and there was a definite pong of hot rubber
after every flight.

Several of us who had experience flying behind VW's (Paz wasn't a
pilot back then) tried to explain the realities of VW engines to Paz
but he made it pretty clear that our experience-based opinions were
not welcome. (Come to think of it, a kid named Burt Something did
exactly the same :-)

In the final analysis the PL-4 -- at nearly 700 pounds -- is a heavy,
complex, expensive airframe that needs more power than a stock 1600 VW
engine can provide. With the same engine, a Teenie Two can fly rings
around it and is a lot easier to land, while a VP-1 is more fun than
either. But of course, those aren't 'real' airplanes... :-)

-R.S.Hoover