Q-talk 3&4 - May/Aug 1987 - index

MAY-AUG 1987
ISSUE NUMBER 3 & 4

QUICKIE BUILDERS ASSOCIATION

INTRODUCTION

by Jim Masal

 

CONGRATULATIONS!

Who are those wise guys that are maligning the reliability of the Onan engine? Here's a pflash pfor yu: QBAer Norm Howell set a new straight line distance world record in class C1.A/0 (aircraft less than 661 lbs at takeoff) on April 9 by flying his 601 lb gross Quickie 777 miles non-stop from Enid, OK to Dayton, OH in 7 hrs, 33 min, averaging 102 mph. Yippeeee and congratulations, Norm.

 

This year looks like it will be a primo year for airplane building! Nobody's had a really bad winter and spring seems to have come out early and pleasantly. So have the weeds. This wonderful spring has been primo for a plethora of distractions: mowing the grass, planting the garden, fixing up the homestead, going to the beach, taking short trips. The time change and longer days have sure been welcome for fitting in all these activities and the airplane too.

This spring will see quite a number of you starting your test-flying phase, or so I gather from a number of your letters pointing in that direction. Remember all our previous advisories about that...AND remember to write.

 

Q-TALK FORMAT

Lately, more of you have been of great help by typing your letters so that I can use your info without re-typing. Alan McFarland and Terry Hall have even figured out how to reduce drawings and type to fit perfectly right out of the envelope. Here's how I do it:

1. Use a good dark ribbon with no breaks in the printed characters. The printer doesn't have to be letter quality, but the ribbon does. Broken or light characters are difficult to read. Don't be a cheapskate on ribbons.

2. Type material inside a space that is just under 5 inches wide, 4 and 7/8 to be exact (or less). I use a normal sized typewriter character (pica is fine), single spaced lines.

3. Once I have it 4-7/8 wide, I reduce all material on a copier to 74-78%, then cut it out in strips and paste it on the master pages like a puzzle. If your letter doesn't fit the space in the puzzle, I either edit and shorten it or hold it for a later issue. Naturally, the closer your work is to my format, the sooner I am tempted to print it.

 

PHOTOS

Pictures can be black and white or in color, it doesn't matter. Normal sized snapshots are preferred. While blow-ups are classy, I ALWAYS have to reduce them to fit. Don't be offended; just know that I won't take up an enormous amount of space to show off just one guy's airplane. When I get your photos, I clip off the extra large chunks of sky, grass or runway (we know what that stuff looks like already); I cut off your yard furniture, car or wall of your hangar until I get to just AIRPLANE, and then it's processed for printing. When you take a shot, try to frame it so none of that extra junk is in the picture if you think about it. If you can get your handsome/pretty mug in the photo without obscuring the important stuff (i.e. AIRPLANE), it would help us identify you if ever we see the plane at an airshow or elsewhere. If you must have a photo back uncut, I generally won't use it unless it's especially nice. Once I have the photos trimmed to my satisfaction, I take them (ALL of them, color AND b&w) to a lithographer who converts them to half-tone photos. Look close and you will see that a half-tone is just a series of black and white dots in varying densities to produce a photo of varying shades of gray, black and white. Sending me B&W photos doesn't save work, but they generally look better in printed copy.

 

DEADLINES

Q-TALK will usually be mailed 7 to 10 days into every even-numbered month EXCEPT for August, which conflicts with Oshkosh and is mailed the last week in July. To see print, ads or other material must be to me by the 20th of every odd month.

This is not a solicitation. Don't get the idea that I require "prepared" material. But if you are going to the typewriter anyway, it may be just as easy to set up my margins, BUT I have been doing just fine with your handwritten letters to date and have not yet found any penmanship that I can't read.

 

RETURN REPLIES

This hasn't been said before, but it needs to be. The volume of mail that runs through here per month gets to be considerable. It would only be considerate of me to thank you for your input and acknowledge it by a return reply. As a solo operator, I have given up trying to meet that goal. Many of you know I have improved my response frequency by using postcards for a quick note at less postage and licking. I will continue to do so, but I don't want anyone to feel ignored or unappreciated if I don't always respond. Very rarely do I get stuff that I won't use, but very often I don't use it as soon as you would hope. Certainly that disappoints a contributor, but I hope you understand that I have to juggle a lot of balls here trying to make the contents of each newsletter satisfy a wide range of needs and tastes. So far, I think your letters have been telling me that it's working.

 

BUILDER BUDDIES

The following QBAers have agreed to take calls (not collect) from other builders who need to talk to someone with more experience then themselves. The fellows listed are NOT experts, NOT renowned technical counselors, NOT official advisors or anything of the sort. They are only buddies who can talk "hangar flying" especially well. They are listed with their state location, special area of interest and phone number.

 

Jim Prell (MO) Onan/Suzuki Quickie (816) 454-9422
Terry Crouch (IA) Onan/LS(1) Quickie (319) 359-4127
Sherman Hanke (SC) Q-2/200 (803) 586-9225
Neal Current (CA) Quickie Elect. Sys (805) 967-0767
Bob Giles (TX) Global Quickie (214) 924-2207

 

Norm Howell (Quickie), an Air Force flight instructor at Vance, AFB, Enid, OK, has agreed to form a "QBA Warbirds Hangar" which would be to keep the building/flying fires stoked up among our military and ex-military guys. He expects to have a regular communication flyer to keep in touch and share experiences. Interested? Write me or Norm at P. O. Box 1723, Enid, OK 73701 (405) 234-9576.

 

THE LAND OF 10,000 LAKES

My wife Mary springs from a close-knit family of 12 Michiganders (Michigeese?) and she is always on the lookout for a reason/excuse to get together with one or all of them. With 12, plus extensions, there are enough weddings, graduations, births, deaths, new houses, anniversaries, holidays, new dog celebrations, etc. to require the full time use of a Learjet and a travel agent (I'd like one of each, please). On the other hand, I am constantly on the lookout for a reason/excuse to link up with some QBAers and see airplanes. In April we had a happy convergence of desires. A family wedding was to take place in the farming community of Milaca, Minnesota, about 60 miles north of Minneapolis. What a perfect reason to own a Q-2! Unfortunately, the one I own is wrecked and so the Toyota had to suffice. The plan was to drive to La Crosse, WI to meet up with Mary's sister and parents and then to wind our way up north through Minneapolis and St. Cloud. I immediately consulted my QBA roster for potential "hospitality" stops. Things looked good, so I packed plenty of film

After a pleasant 10 hour drive (who's kiddin' who?), we stopped in Kansas City to get a tour of Jim Prell's Suzuki powered Quickie. Jim's installation looks as good as the pictures I've published and his laboriously finished cowl looked even better. He's even got molds made in case this engine is as successful as he hopes. The plane has been hopped without the cowl so we should have some details by the next newsletter.

A mere 10 hours later, we were in La Crosse at only 1 a.m. Gosh, cars are wonderful. La Crosse is a great place to fly Quickies; it sits in a 10 mile wide Mississippi river valley with bluffs on the MN and WI sides. Very picturesque. While enjoying the relatives, I took time to drag my bro-in-law off to visit Lyle Harrison one evening. Lyle is on an unhurried quest of sorts to build the ultimate 'round the world Quickie. So far he has 3 fuselages (one each in fiberglass, Kevlar and all-carbon fiber), and 2 sets of wings. The 3rd set of wings will have the LS-1 canard with Lyle's own carbon fiber spar. It's helped to have a carbon fiber manufacturing plant (Fiberite) 30 mi. up the road with second and production overruns for sale AND a co-operative engineering staff. Lyle has learned one hell of a lot about composite construction, and get this: he has no pilot license and his regular job is as a conductor on a freight train. My brother-in-law (a non-aviation type) was only slightly more fascinated than I was. Lyle hoped that his wider, deeper and lighter Quickie with the right engine will carry enough fuel to deliver an experienced pilot across the longest over water portion of a 'round-the-world flight. What a goal!

Also living in the La Crosse area is Charlie Lipke, a new Quickie flier. Charlie has a nice looking Quickie, but since the winds were too gusty for a demo, we spent the day quicktalking. Charlie is organizing a QBAer get-together. See details herein.

We made a short day trip to Rochester, MN where we visited some relatives, the Mayo Clinic, and, what else, a visit with Wes Foss who is having a fit trying to control his new Q-2. He has had his share of ground loops and so has an ex-USAF buddy he enlisted to help tame the bird. Wes plans some mods to the tailwheel.

With my appetite now whetted, I left my wife to an extra day with her family while I beat it on up to Minneapolis to see more Q's. If you want to see a hotbed of Q activity, you must drop in on dealer Marv Getten's hangar at Flying Cloud Airport on the SW side. Wow! I saw 4 Q-2/200/Tri-Q projects and 1 Quickie. These guys have the full range of Q experience to share, from Getten's high time virtually unscratched Q-2 to planes that have been ground looped and flipped over. And these Midwesterners are VERY personable. My first visit to MN left me anxious for more.

Earl (Tri-Q about done) and Lila Nelson put me up for the night in their beautiful pad on Lake Minnetonka and that evening Marv Getten planned some "hospitality" at a local restaurant attended by builders Max and Bev Kroll, Jim and Catherine Casey, Ed Schwietzer, the Nelsons and Marv's wife Glenda. I was complimented to learn that some of the wives read QUICKTALK too. These guys are following the plans but are finding angle of incidence problems on flying that cause them to be suspicious of the plans instructions. More on this later. I also got the scoop on the so-called "Flying Pipe" seen one year at Oshkosh. You OSH regulars may remember a plane built by a guy named Neuman that looked like it was bludgeoned out of a piece of aluminum. It had a 150 cowl and engine, a fat tube boom going to the tail and end plates on the wings sharp enough to cut you. It cruised at something like 85 mph and stalled at 75, and the builder was dead serious about it. Turned out he ended up seriously dead. Among other things, he used hardware store pop rivets, and after 5-6 hrs. flight time a piece of aluminum was seen fluttering off and the plane went in like a dagger. Everyone laughed about this plane at OSH, but nobody was able to stop what turned out to be inevitable. That's the kind of freedom we still have in this country.

The day after our dinner, Marv took me for a hop in his Champ to view the local area then we rolled on over to St. Paul with Earl to check on Casey and Kroll's projects. Mighty nice workmanship that should see flight by early '88. They're building side-by-side and that looks like an effective way to keep the motivation strong and the quality high.

I left Minneapolis for my wedding activities further north delighted to be involved with all these guys through the pages of Q-TALK.

 

 

...HOSPITALITY CLUB UPDATE...

As of May 10th, we have members who have extended their hospitality and look forward to meeting fellow members in the following states: COLORADO, GEORGIA, ILLINOIS (2), NEW YORK, OHIO, TENNESSEE and WASHINGTON. My thanks to these members.

Let this just be the beginning. Don't let the fact that your state may already be represented stop you from submitting your name. Refer to the last issue for what to send. For a complete list and information, send a legal size SASE to: Ted Fox, P. O. Box 23, Mansfield, OH 44901

 

On May 17, Q-200 flier Bob Malechek put together a short-notice cookout and ride get-together at his hangar in Denton, TX. Three of the ladies and five of the guys got "motivation" rides in Bob's Q-200 on a beautiful and smooth Sunday evening. Even a flight-frightened Sue Giles took a hop. It must be some kind of oddball distinction to have your first light plane flight occur in a Q-200. Straight landings were enjoyed by all (great burgers, too. Thanks Bob and Jean!).

 

On June 12, in La Crosse, WI. Charlie Lipke is anxious to have a gathering of QBAers at the La Crosse airport. He has sent invitations out to 50 QBAers that live within the surrounding 250 miles. You folks in MN, WI and IA should drag your planes, parts, plans, etc. out for a FUN day. Charlie has 30 hours on his Quickie now and wants to get more planes flying. For complete details, contact Charlie at W6584 Red Oak Glen, Onalaska, WI 54650 or call (608) 526-9546 after 6 pm.

 

On June 20, in Dallas/Ft. Worth. Cliff and Carolyn Stripling invite Dallas area Q-builders, enthusiasts and their families to their home at 2313 Colleen Ct, Carrollton, TX 75007 from 7 pm until 11 pm. "We will supply the evening meal with the exception of what you want to bring to burn on the grill. Bring bathing suits if you want to swim and any Q-videos or other Q-type show-and-tell. Weather permitting; we hope to enjoy outdoors, the pool, the sunset and the view of the city lights that night. Out-of-town Q-types are also invited. We can even put up one couple for that night with advance notification. Join us." Please R.S.V.P. (214) 306-7139. Cliff has an almost complete Quickie.

 

After Oshkosh, date to be announced. Jeff and Tammy Cox plan to organize a post-Oshkosh debriefing at their place in Arlington, TX. Watch this space for details.

Other Articles In This Issue

LETTERS - by Jim Masal
Q-TIPS - by Jim Masal
QUICKIE HINTS - by Jim Masal
ODDS and ENDS - by Jim Masal
Q-2 HINTS - by Jim Masal
CLASSIFIEDS - by Jim Masal
QUICKSHOTS - by Jim Masal

 


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