Kit Aircraft Modifications

Hello Everyone,

News coming across the wire in the last couple of days is that David Carrigan from Prince Edward Island, Canada has flown the first RV-10 to be built north of the 49th parallel.

I had the opportunity to talk with Dave on the phone the other day as he had seen a post of mine and called to find out where I was in the construction of my ‘10. He hadn’t flown his yet when he called so I would like to publicly say congratulations to him for getting his new bird into the sky.

Dave has what I think is going to be a popular modification made to his airplane. He has swapped out the standard Van’s cowl for the new James Aircraft Holy Cowl. This is a cowl patterned after the successful designs of Ray LoPresti. It has the round inlets that have a significantly smaller inlet area. This along with the engine cooling plenum that they sell significantly reduce the drag on the airframe.

Here is a picture of Dave’s RV-10.

This cowl and plenum have just been made available for the RV-10 but they have been popular with the other models of RV. From the posts that I have observed on the Matronics RV-10 forum there has been some difficulties in getting the cowl installed and the majority of the issues revolved around the lower cowl exit louvers. There seemed to be trouble in integrating the Van’s produced louvers into the new bottom cowl. I have only got this second hand so I need to hear more information on this. I will post any comments I get to this page.

We are all hoping that the speed numbers will be better than the original and that the engine has good cooling. Dave has said that he will post some numbers as he gets more time on the aircraft.

I am working on a way to get you higher resolution photos to you. In other posts I have been able to link to another site but I received this photo via e-mail. I should have it available for you to link to very soon.

Dave

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 28th, 2007 at 1:20 pm and is filed under Van's Aircraft. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.