By Bruce Sturgill bruce@pursuitofflight.com Photos: Morgan Hunter CONTACT! Magazine readers may remember Bruce’s contribution, “Building a Corvair Cruiser”, in the May -June, 2007, issue where we featured the Personal Cruiser. As a beta-builder we asked Bruce to keep us posted about his progress and provide us with follow-up articles. So with that, here’s number two in what we hope will be an ongoing series. ~Pat I’m building a sporty, sexy little plane, the Personal Cruiser, a kit aircraft that’s manufactured by ProComposites Inc. Some time back I produced a TV story on a couple of builders who were going through “Lancair’s Builders Assist Program” at their factory. I thought it was a great idea but at a cost of $4,000 per week at that time, it was way out of my budget, so was their plane, but that’s another story. The builders I interviewed really liked their program and thought it was well worth the time and money. Having someone walk them through the building process certainly gave them a jumpstart on completing their plane. So I thought, how could I get some type of assistance like that with my plane?
IT SEEMS TO MAKE SENSE My reasoning was building with someone who has already built a plane like the one I’m building should be a really good shot in the arm for both the plane and myself, being a new builder. So I called Scott VanderVeen at Pro -Composites and asked if they had such a program. He said they do offer a builder assist program where they come to your garage/hanger and assist you with the construction of your Personal Cruiser or the Vision Aircraft. Being a beta builder of the Personal Cruiser, the thought of having someone come to me never really crossed my mind during my construction process so I jumped at the chance. Arrangements were made, plans were discussed, materials were ordered and Morgan Hunter of Pro-Composites came out during the first week of October. He arrived on Monday around noon after a long flight from Florida to Portland, Oregon, and we didn’t waste any time getting to work. He looked over the plane closely to see exactly how good my construction skills were, patted me on the back, and said I did excellent work but also pointed out some things that could be “a little more excellent.” And thus we began by making an attack plan for the coming week, including correcting a few minor mistakes that were made during my construction. Morgan’s attention to small details of my plane helped make assembling other parts a lot easier. www.ContactMagazine.com
THE WEEK BEGINS Over the course of the week (Morgan left very early the following Sunday morning), we took my “tub” and turned it into a “tub with wings” or something that really resembled an airplane. We aligned spars, drilled holes, poured liquid foam, mixed epoxy, laid a lot of fiberglass, microed wing cores in place to make those spars look like wings and mixed a lot more epoxy. I also got to experience what happens when you have micro that’s too thick and you get an exothermal reaction. You don’t want to do that with wing’s cores and pour foam; it’s a lot of work and time fixing that little mess. Morgan did comment that construction goes a lot faster when you have someone mixing micro and cutting glass for you; loosely translated, “slave.”
Morgan turned out to be the resident photographer so the best photo available of him doing any work is this one where he’s fitting a rib to the spar. I found out that what you think you should get done and what actually gets done are very different. I planned out all the things that we were going to accomplish during
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