New(ish) Member

Discussion area for builders of Pietenpol aircraft, both beginners and experienced folks. Share ideas, ask questions and help build the Pietenpol community.
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Chris_899DP
Posts: 4
Joined: Tue Nov 15, 2022 2:38 pm

New(ish) Member

Post by Chris_899DP »

Hi Everyone!

I have been hanging around on the FB group for what seems like near a decade and I have been the caretaker of "Pietenpol Girl" NX899DP (a 2008 build) since 2016. She was originally model A powered but was cracked up on her first flight after an engine failure. She was put back together by another local pilot, fitted with an A65 continental and the 40hrs flown off in 2013 after which the engine was removed for a cub and she sat in the back of a hangar for 3 years. I acquired the airframe in the fall of 2016 and mounted another A65 and flew her home. At first she was not enjoyable at all to fly, the controls were sloppy and she was badly out of rig, to the point that she ran out of rudder on her first paved runway takeoff and I had to haul her into the air at just above stall to keep from taking out the runway lights (found out later gear tracking was way off). I put something like 4hrs on her that winter before a bit of a crosswind combined with the poor gear tracking and a shoddy repair from the builders accident contributed to a 2nd landing incident. As I got into the process of disassembling the broken bits I discovered a slew of double drilled bolt holes in the longerons and wing attach fittings on the fuselage (the rear horizontal bolt on the FWD LH strut to fuselage bracket wasn't even through anything other than the fuselage sheeting and interior ply gusset). other issues were a complete lack of edge margin on the vertical bolts in the fuselage carry throughs (one had even broken out) and a lack of edge margin on the engine mount to longeron bolts (noticing a theme here).

It was a frustrating 4 years of disassembling, inspecting, and rebuilding to fix the damage from the gear collapse as well as correct all the errors made by the builder and shoddy repairs by the first rebuilder but in March 2022 I finally returned her to the sky. So far in 2022 I have managed to put 19hrs on her in between kansas wind storms and finally have all the rigging and trim issues resolved! I can report that she now flys exactly as Pietenpol should! With a little bit of luck and good weather I may even attend the Brodhead gathering this year, Its just a bit over a hop, skip, and jump from Udall, KS though!
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taildrags
Posts: 637
Joined: Tue Mar 07, 2017 10:39 pm

Re: New(ish) Member

Post by taildrags »

Well Chris, you've described the journey I started out on with my Piet just about to a 'T'. Veterans Day 2004 my new (to me) Air Camper was being piloted (not by me) to a local school football field for a flyover at a gathering of veterans when carb ice formation began making the engine run rough despite application of carb heat. A precautionary landing in a patch of south Texas brush country was just about made when rough ground grabbed a wheel and caused welds on one of the main gear legs to give. The plane went down on its knees, up on its nose, and then over on its back, and my reconstruction journey began. Just about the same amount of time as yours, too. During the rebuild the carb heat setup was modified to provide actual effective carb heat rather than just letting the incoming air shoot past the bare exhaust stacks so that little problem got fixed but like you, I began working my way down a long road of finding and fixing little things with just about every system on the airplane. One thing led to another but I finally did get my first ride in, and checkout in, a plane that I had purchased a few years earlier but had never flown or operated before that. That first taste was like biting right out of the middle of a slice of watermelon though... the sweetest, juiciest part and no seeds to spit out ;o) What a sweetheart of a plane. Enjoying the ride ever since then!

Oscar Zuniga
Medford, OR
Air Campr NX41CC, A75 power
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