Dr. His, After reading your posts I thought I would chime in on my experience flying my stock kr2 with retracts.
I first flew my bird (N54PB) on Dec.7,1991 yes Pearl Harbor day, I originally flew it using the Azusa round brake drums supplied by Ran Robinson. These brakes were not good, first, the drums were NOT round, second I didn’t like the cable setup and had converted them to hydraulic using automotive slave cylinders (used for actuating clutches on Toyota Corolla standard transmissions) in conjunction with toe brakes and master cylinders from Aircraft Spruce. I got the brake system to work but the brakes would not hold during full run up, 1835 with turbo and a 52 X 52 prop. When applying brakes one could feel the out of round drums also. After the second flight ended in my right landing gear leg coming off due to poor engineering from Rand Robinson, (plans called for AN 3 bolts holding the gear legs on should have been much larger) bolts completely stripped through the small nuts causing the gear to fail. I redesigned the gear and used a one inch thick aluminum spring bar versus the original 3/4” and installed full disk brakes on the wheels. Later after another mishap concerning RAnd Robinson’s original design for the gear locks, I redesigned the locks using a positive pin lock system. Flying the standard KR2: I had never flown one before and had limited experience with tail staggers, I did have over 4000 hours flying F-4 flight simulators and a lot of time flying right seat in different types of tail wheel planes with friends of mine. I found the plane is very responsive in pitch and rudder control inputs and a little slow on ailerons, my opinion. My experience in the F-4 sims helped a lot in overcoming the poor tendencies. I also have several dry lakes close to my home base and used them to get a lot of ground handling and high speed taxing in prior to my first flight. I also took off and landed on this dry lake for the first flight. I still have my bird setup as per original plans, bought in late 1970’s except for the brakes and the gear locking system everything is built according to plans. Let me know if I can provide any further information. Signed Parley Byington A Vietnam era veteran N54PB KR-2 Henderson No Sent from my iPhone _______________________________________________ Search the KRnet Archives at https://www.mail-archive.com/krnet@list.krnet.org/. Please see LIST RULES and KRnet info at http://www.krnet.org/info.html. see http://list.krnet.org/mailman/listinfo/krnet_list.krnet.org to change options. To UNsubscribe from KRnet, send a message to krnet-le...@list.krnet.org
