7T......Reading your October post on Auto Tow. But first gotta tell you I have LS-1f N57T. Contest number original to Rudy Moser was 7T when I bought it in 1984.
Concerning auto tow, I used to do it quite a bit. Having learned to fly on the winch in a 2-22 at Black Forest in 1965, I found auto towing pretty much the same. The system which We all liked best was to use a pulley. Glider accelleration is so fast that two people, pilot and driver sufficed. The late Mike Evans and I used to fly together at Westcliffe, Colorado all the time. Using wing stands only we never needed a wing runner, and never ever had any problems. Radio is essential between pilot and driver. We could fine tune airspeed by voice communication. If you need 10 more knots at the glider, remember to ask only for five. The glider is traveling at twice the car speed. The reason we used the pulley was so we could tow with my manual stick Toyota Land Cruiser. With the pulley we did the entire tow in 2nd gear and did not need to shift. Shifting would have put a big strain on the car, and we were afraid it would have induced a big interuption of speed. To pulley tow with a single pulley you need a long runway and a lot of rope. We had a 4300' 3/8 poly rope with weak links at each end. We routinely saw tows ranging from 1700 to 1900 feet. At Westcliffe I cannot think of a many times that any of us had to relight. During winter the primary wave of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains is overhead and believe it or not we used to often find strong wave lift as low as 400 and 500 feet agl. Unless I had enciuntered it often and someone told me I would not believe it. But it's true. During summer thermals were plentiful and a 1700 foot tow worked fine. I did straight auto tows later when living at Pinedale Wyoming. I had a 2500 foot rope and 1600 feet agl was pretty standard. If you are going for quantity of flights then aerotow is probably faster. Repositioning the rope eats up time. I always had a parachute on the end of the rope with a 15 foot leader from the apex of the chute to the glider. That way the rope layed out straight. If after the glider has released from a pulley tow, and there is runway remaining the car can continue which pulls the rope and parachute closer to the pulley with a straight rope as the parachute lands. athis saves lots of retrieval time. C.G. hooks work best for ground launch. Nose hooks with too much back pressure at the top of the launch will cause the glider to porpoise. Releasing some back pressure remedies that. If you can get endorsed by an instructor with experience, I highly recommend ground launching. The runways we used were 6000 feet long. The setup we used to pulley tow was to attach the end of the rop to another car parked well off to the side of the runway, then loop the rope through the snatch block pulley securely tied to the tow hitch on the tow car. We tied it because it needs to be flexable. Then we pulled away from the glider. In order to tow towards the glider as in the case of a short runway, you need a second pulley to reverse direction. The pulley or pulleys need to be high quality with ball bearings and grease fittings. Mine have always been about 6 inch diameter. Also dont use nylon rope. Too much stretch. After liftoff on the pulley tow expect some bowing or slack as there is some sling shot effect as the stretch comes out of the rope. It only lasts a couple seconds so do not rotate into a steeper attitude until the rope is tight again.