HP-18 N44FF "F1"

Last fall I purchased an HP-18 glider from Texas.  Left outside in a trailer that's falling apart, it was in rough shape.  Here's what on the plan.

1 - Clean/Fix and get it airworthy
2 - Install avionics
3 - Convert to center stick
4 - Fly cross country  and competitions
5 - Upgrade to FES

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

VAT - Vario All-In-One Take 2

Image
My last post talked about building my own traffic alerting and avoidance and air-data from varios components. Since then I stumbled on an amazing open source project that dramatically simplifies this plan.  It uses one off-the-shelf consumer Radio/GPS board to do all the traffic and it has pins I can program to accept the barometric, pressure and temperature sensor data. The project is called SoftRF Here are the components bought.  Total cost... $64.10 T-Beam ESP32 LoRa WiFi Module -915MHz 868M/900M/915Mhz Antenna Module Aerial MS5611-01BA03 Barometeric Pressure sensor MPXV7002DP  Differential Pressure   So... I pulled the trigger! With this I should get airspeed, altitude, total energy variometer, FLARM, ADS-B and OGN traffic advisery all on my XCSoar Phone/Tablet.  That's _HUGE_
Read more

Lot to catch up on here...

This blog was intended to document the restoration of an HP-18 glider to airworthiness... It turned into a place I would dump my random soaring / electronics projects.  I'm going to back to the purpose I created this blog... Document the project. Photo Album Here's a rough time-line; 2018 Nov : Purchased glider Nov/Dec: removed all controls linkages, stripped corrosion, re-primed, lubed all bearings Dec: Replaced landing gear wheel... no brake master cylinder... what to do?! then it sat... Interim ... I gave up on the center stick (for now) and electric motor (for now) and decided to focus all my energy on getting it airworthy-as-is! 2020 March: Picked up the project again...   Purchased a go-kart brake system Rigged it up to the brake handle on the side stick Built the BackFire IMU and BackFire PFD April: Finished up and got the annual signed off. Now it's time to fly!  The plan is to bring it down to Sunflower this year, keep...
Read more

The "un panel"

Image
The trend in avionics has been consolidation a minimizing foot print.  The ultimate expression of that idea is the "unpanel".  This was first done on a Zenith 750 Superduty  unpanel, but the idea applies to a glider just as much if not more. Remove the panel, remove the pod, it's just a tablet on a flexible boom.  This is already how I fly now, using XCSoar and my phone... Here's a video of a setup similar to what I'm using now on my Silent and the club's Libelle. It's not pretty, but it works, a good flexible mount and a larger format tablet, would really make a huge difference.  But you ask.. Hey you don't have airspeed or barometric pressure altitude or a real vario!  Ooo - contraire mon'amie...  I have setup a BlueFly vario with airspeed.   XCSoar can read the airspeed, barometric pressure and displays it as altitude just as any Primary Flight Display (PFD) would... all out of the box, no coding required. And finally... w...
Read more