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Editorial: "Landing Gear" Trouble

By Tracy Crook. Originally published in the Rotary Aviation News, Issue 5, 1996

“Landing Gear “ Trouble

As mentioned in the last issue, I was scheduled for some Bio-mechanical maintaininance on my much abused body shortly before Copperstate. Some 15 years ago I picked up an artificial hip as a result of a horrendous aircraft accident. Now it was worn out and due for replacement. The story of the crash is a long one and is the subject of a future magazine article.

The hip replacement went off just fine but somehow the nerves to my right foot were damaged during the procedure leaving me with a condition known as “dropfoot”, the inability to lift the toe end of the foot. I could extend the foot just fine but I couldn’t lift it back up. This made it impossible to drive due to the inability to heel and toe between brake and accelerator pedals.

They tell me this is a temporary condition and I hope they’re right but in the meantime, I was amazed to find that they could not recommend any medical device to help people with this condition. It took me about 10 minutes to devise a solution consisting of a belt around the waist (worn under trousers) and a bungy cord hooked under the lower shoelaces and attached to the belt at the other end. This solution worked just fine and astounded the neurologist I was seeing. There is obviously a killing lack of imagination in the medical field.

That’s all very interesting, you say, but what has that got to do with rotary engine conversion? After thinking about it for awhile, it occurred to me that the single most important thing you need when doing something like an auto engine conversion, is the confidence to use your imagination in unfamiliar situations. The critical nature of the task causes a lot of otherwise very creative people to freeze up when faced with a simple design decision. There is nothing wrong with taking advantage of the experience of others and following their lead but in the field of auto engine conversion, there is no such thing as a complete step by step cookbook.

By way of example, several builders have called to ask questions like “What do I do with the holes where the fuel injectors used to go?”. Now these were highly educated people, one of whom had done a total thermodynamic analysis of the rotary engine which was way beyond my abilities. The answer to the question of course is to plug them up but the point here is that some extremely able people doubt themselves on a simple matter because they know that the overall project has life or death consequences.

This is not meant to be critical of the people who ask the questions or to trivialize the questions themselves. How to properly plug those holes is important. If the plug should be ingested into the engine there will be dire consequences and this needs to be considered when deciding how to do it. Approach this and all other tasks in the same way that you build an airplane. Think of each and every part or task as if it were the airplane. Do not start a work session thinking about finishing any given subassembly. It is the individual hole you are drilling, the rivet you are setting or the part you are fabricating that you should be thinking about. But I digress…..

Back on the subject of those injector holes, one thing you might want to consider is the possibility of someday wanting to put a fuel injector back in that hole. That is the reason I went to the trouble of designing an easily removable plug. Racing Beat sells some fine looking removable plugs for this purpose but I think you can find a better use for the $55.00 they cost. I made mine from the fuel injector atomizer inserts that came on the engine and glued a short length of phenolic dowel rod into the inserts. There is nothing sacred about the phenolic dowels, I just happened to have some laying around.

Next Year for Sure….

Due to the medical complications already mentioned, I was very disappointed that I could not make it to Copperstate this year. Dyke Delta builder Kelly Troyer did attend and filled me in on some of the things I missed there. With Ron Gowan’s rotary powered Longeze down for a retractable gear retrofit and Powersport deciding to sit this one out, the only rotary powered airplane in attendance this year was David Atkin’s 13B powered RV-6. Kelly was able to catch a ride in Dave’s RV during the fly-in. Didn’t have time in my brief conversation with Kelly but maybe next time we talk I can get some unbiased performance impressions about Dave’s airplane.

By the way, if any of you are planing on building a Dyke Delta, contact Kelly at the address below. He puts out a newsletter specifically for Delta builders using the Mazda rotary for power. Kelly is using an aftermarket EFI induction system on his 13B and has supplied me with a wealth of information on parts and data for EFI. It has been a great help in developing my own system and I’ll be passing this stuff along in this newsletter.

It sounded like overall attendance at Copperstate was down this year as was the case at Oshkosh. It may be just a coincidence but I heard from a lot of builders who usually never miss the big one at Oshkosh, that they were skipping it this year so they could concentrate on finishing their own projects.