• Welcome aboard HomebuiltAirplanes.com, your destination for connecting with a thriving community of more than 10,000 active members, all passionate about home-built aviation. Dive into our comprehensive repository of knowledge, exchange technical insights, arrange get-togethers, and trade aircrafts/parts with like-minded enthusiasts. Unearth a wide-ranging collection of general and kit plane aviation subjects, enriched with engaging imagery, in-depth technical manuals, and rare archives.

    For a nominal fee of $99.99/year or $12.99/month, you can immerse yourself in this dynamic community and unparalleled treasure-trove of aviation knowledge.

    Embark on your journey now!

    Click Here to Become a Premium Member and Experience Homebuilt Airplanes to the Fullest!

Search results

Find deals on amazon
Advertise with us
This site may earn a commission from merchant affiliate links, including eBay, Amazon, and others.
  1. kubark42

    Plans format preferences and pricing

    There's so much going wrong with your responses here, it would be unfair to everyone to dive in any deeper. If I could call you on the phone, I'd walk you through how your responses have been needlessly abrasive to a point of view you manufactured to then disagree with. And if the convo didn't...
  2. kubark42

    Plans format preferences and pricing

    You make excellent points in this post, and while I agree with this one, I would just add that value flows both ways in this relationship. I would feel I got the short end of the stick if I am paying a monthly fee in order to discuss problems which arose due to the designer's mistake. While I...
  3. kubark42

    Plans format preferences and pricing

    I'm smh here. I don't particularly know what you're selling, and it was kind of outside the scope of the response I made to @ToddK. However, you took issue and held me up as the poster child for why we need to make engineers' lives more difficult than they need to be, and that was unneeded and...
  4. kubark42

    Plans format preferences and pricing

    I'm confused. I've already bought your part. You've already gotten my money and shipped it to me. Now I'm holding it in my hand and trying to integrate it into my plane. Why intentionally antagonize me by making it harder for me to use your part in my assembly? I don't need to know the...
  5. kubark42

    Plans format preferences and pricing

    I'm not really your target market, because I'm unlikely to build a plane from anything other than a kit, but FWIW I would be shocked to find that the plans are not available in a digital form. To someone who is used to working in the digital world, paper is only useful when there's a physical...
  6. kubark42

    Homemade Autopilot with a Raspberry/computer

    This is great on so many levels. I'd dreamed about doing this on a glider, and now here's a great demonstration of it working. Would you consider opening up a new thread on this all alone? I feel like there are a million things to plumb here. I've been thinking about how to do pitch, because in...
  7. kubark42

    Homemade Autopilot with a Raspberry/computer

    That is not the power regulation @pfarber is talking about. Computers have many voltages onboard, and they are all transformed from the primary input voltages. In this case, the offboard stuff is the DC barrel jack we mentioned earlier. Once you get onboard, the RPi 4 has at least 2 step-down...
  8. kubark42

    Homemade Autopilot with a Raspberry/computer

    I agree with everything you say. I mean "please avoid soldered..." in the same spirit as "please avoid metal in microwaves". Of course anyone can safely put all kinds of metals in microwaves, but it's really hard to explain the ins and outs for why one shape is safe and another isn't. Just...
  9. kubark42

    Homemade Autopilot with a Raspberry/computer

    Very wisely put. Mea culpa and apologies where they are due. The OP had asked for an "autopilot/autostabilizer", and I missed the meaning of that second part. "Autostabilizer" likely indicates that s/he is really just after something to reduce the effort of keeping the plane going straight and...
  10. kubark42

    Homemade Autopilot with a Raspberry/computer

    I literally LOLed at this one. I see so many ostensibly industrial equipment packages which would die at the first hint of an aviation HALT test. At my former drone company, we developed multirotor drones which flew 24/7 for weeks non-stop. Connectors were the devil, and we had a guy whose job...
  11. kubark42

    Homemade Autopilot with a Raspberry/computer

    If we're going to agree to disagree, then as one expert to another I would like to better understand your work to understand the basis for your claim. Otherwise, I don't see any room for disagreement here, although I certainly can't prevent anyone from having their own opinion. To be clear, the...
  12. kubark42

    Exian's composite planes

    (@Exian, pinging you here because I believe you have turned off your DMs.) Several of us here and from all around (RAS, Grasshopper, French DuckHawk e-conversion, etc...) have a Slack group for real-time discussion of eGliders. We're all moving in the same direction and it's been very helpful to...
  13. kubark42

    Arduino/ strobe controller + engine monitor

    Sounds fun! In lieu of thermocouples, I would consider NTC thermistors. They are much cheaper to use, as they provide a temperature-sensitive resistance instead of a thermocouple's weak mV signal. No specialized circuitry is required for a microcontroller (e.g. Arduino) to read them directly...
  14. kubark42

    Homemade Autopilot with a Raspberry/computer

    I hate to contradict, but I categorically disagree with this statement. IMHO, the control part is easy, but the computing aspects take 95% of the code and 99.9% of the time. My experience is drone autopilots, and I cofounded TauLabs, which was an entire autopilot ecosystem-- autopilot hardware...
  15. kubark42

    Windex 1200c

    What a beautiful plane. There's some info archive.org managed to capture: Wayback Machine Bonne chance et tiens nous au courrant !
  16. kubark42

    Using only 4 out of 6 propeller mounting bolts

    You typically don't want truss joints to transmit torque. It's much harder on the joint, and it makes analysis harder. Much better to pin the joint and let it rotate freely. When you are working with wing joints which are designed not to move, you frequently (maybe always?) use close tolerance...
  17. kubark42

    Flying Wires vs Struts

    As others have pointed out, the tradeoff between weight and aerodynamics is largely a function of airspeed. If money is no object, then flat wire is probably the best bang for the buck. Not quite as aerodynamic as a streamlined tube, but it weighs much less. If ultimate weight is the goal...
  18. kubark42

    Using only 4 out of 6 propeller mounting bolts

    This got me curious to actually do the math. I'm using the existing propeller attached to the MZ35 two-stroke on my AC-5M: mu = 0.2 # Stiction coefficient, taken from emperical tests for wood on aluminum, c.f...
  19. kubark42

    Using only 4 out of 6 propeller mounting bolts

    The hub manufacturer pointed me toward the motor manufacturer torque spec. The motor manufacturer does indeed give a spec, but my guess is that it's derived from the max capacity of the aluminum threads, and not attaining the required interface friction. My TBO is 25hrs (which should cover the...
  20. kubark42

    Using only 4 out of 6 propeller mounting bolts

    Those are good suggestions. I'm fortunate in my application that very little of that is of a high order. My prop blades weigh 200g and my thrust is around 400N in a pusher configuration. RPM is somewhere between 2500 and 2700RPM, so it is a low power, low inertia setup. You dodge a lot of...
Back
Top