I love air powered tools. In my little airplane single engine land construction hanger, when I fired up the air wrench, that inimitable sound meant one thing: Making progress toward an ambitious goal of flying the United States. As many States as I could. In an aircraft I had built myself. Low. And slow. Like, […]
More progress. Took all that old sheetmetal off except for the 4 pieces I’ll eventually reuse. Isn’t TZero nice, sitting in the sunset? Couple other views: My wife says this looks like something out of Mad Max and that she’s going to wave at me from the ground. Also she claims that she’s going […]
Just worked on pulling the core apart. It’s difficult, lots of rust. Using multiple cans of penetrating oil. Engine serial No: T04I3RG, Heads S/N: 3856743. This identifies as a 1965-1969 95 HP Corvair engine core. Power washed. Removed sheet metal and accessories including carburetor and some vacuum lines.
This: To be able to see these: Which are the case studs and the nuts that the heads are torqued onto the cylinders and case with. Luckily TZero looks in pretty good shape. Disassembly soon. But what I’ve been spending my time on mostly is this absolute wonder: This manual — the product […]
Fifty-plus year old Corvair motors can clean up real nice, but it does take work, and in this case considerable work. Here is the beginning of the beginning once TZero had been trailered home. Initial spray down: TZero gets his first washdown.
Once the guys at John’s Salvage had pulled the core for me I took my garden trailer over to the junkyard. I found two guys struggling to put a chain onto the motor so they could put it in my trailer. I got them to stop what they were doing and brought my trusty hand […]
I don’t know how long T04I3RG was buried at John’s Salvage, but I was real excited to pick her up today. She’s mostly intact, no major damage by outside inspection. No she doesn’t rotate — and that might be a bigger problem — but I hope it is merely cylinder and piston ring rust. The […]
IV I’d lived less than 15 minutes from Old Kingsbury Aerodrome for nine years before I dropped by with my daughter. Earlier that day I’d found a Corvair engine I was going to convert to drive the CH 750 I wanted to build. 85TE, as it’s identified on navigation charts and with the FAA, has […]
1:00pm After finding a core for my Corvair CH750 project out at the junkyard, where I sweated in the September heat and was scratched all over by thorny brush, I headed over to the Pioneer Flight Museum, twelve minutes away from my house: Old Kingsbury Aerodrome. It happened to be volunteer day and I met […]
I I headed out to John’s Salvage just south of Seguin Texas in search of a useable Corvair engine that I could rebuild into an experimental aircraft engine. I had called John, and he’d said that he had about 30 Corvairs left that still had engines. However he added that all the engines that you’d […]