Considering building a Fly Baby

I put about 15 hours on a Flybaby built by a tech college in the 70s and
it was a neat airplane except for the lack of a shock absorbing landing
gear. It depends totally on soft tires for shock absorbtion, so taxing
on the ground it follows every ground contour like a two-wheeled
wheelbarrow. In spite of the lack of spring gear I was successful at
making it bounce about 4 feet in the air during a sloppy full stall
landing one time.

Also if control cable is used for flying wire (as this one did) it
stretches quite a lot under load. In a 2G turn the upper cables would
curve back about an inch or so as they went slack which was somewhat
disconcerting at first. You have to be very confident in your
nicropress skills. If I was building one I would use 1x19 cable instead
of 7x19 with terminal swages instead of nicropress, or better yet
streamline rod.

John

Ron Wanttaja wrote:
On Mon, 05 Jun 2006 14:30:17 GMT, john smith wrote:


In article ,
"TerryJ" suptjudatcomcastdotnet wrote:


I am 65, retired and don't have a license to fly anything. I am fairly good
with woodworking (built a few pieces of furniture and my father was a master
carpenter) and have the basic shop tools so was considering a Fly Baby. Any
advice or opinions from you folks that have 'done it'?

How tall are you?
How flexible are you?
Find someone that has one and see how easily you can get in and out.
At 6'3", it was too small for me.


Depends on how the person is put together, and what kind of mods are made during
construction. The designer was 6' 2", so you probably are proportionately
longer the legs than he was. Chris Brown is 6' 5" and did a few mods to the
airplane he bought.

For more details, see "Fly Babies for the Big and Tall":

http://www.bowersflybaby.com/tech/room.html

Certainly should find one first, to see how the stock fit is.

Ron Wanttaja