Kolb Firefly Unfolding and Walk Around

hey YouTube it's me then I'm gonna talk about my cold Firefly a lot of guys are asking questions about it so I thought I'd do a short little video about the cold fire play how I set it up and I'm gonna rig it up like I'm gonna fly it and then we'll walk around it and talk about a little bit okay guys you can see that only took me about six minutes usually to unfold the same from in my bar and fold it up you're ready to fly out of my yard and have fun you know probably takes double that if you're new to it but I've done it so many times I mean for two years I've been doing that every time I fly it and it hasn't got old VX it's so easy to do it was much easier than trying to cram one through my 14-foot door sideways on a cart or something so this is the way to be for me so here it is let's check it out okay so like I said this is a cold Firefly this was built in 2006 I did not build it I bought it flying it hadn't been flown in a few years when I got it but I went through it and I was flying other models ultralights at the time and this was my first Kolbe and kind of fell in love with it and it works out perfectly forward I do a lot of guys were asking about certain things I've done to it or you know tire size and all that kind of stuff so I thought we just make a video and go over it so here it is I got the winter windshield on it right now this is how I fly it in the colder months I much prefer the short windshield which is more like a motorcycle one that comes up to like right here so that you probably seen on other videos or something that's way more fun but only when it's you know over 70 degrees in the summertime here in Michigan but yeah so let's start with that this windshield was also not made by me but it works really good there's no hinge it just flexes the material put the kickstand in there and that is how you open the windshield you can see that it's the windshield stops right here and your head is kind of sitting in this area but I've flown this thing in you know 20 degrees and perfectly comfortable if you're comfortable sitting in this on the ground you'd be comfortable in the air flying it because there's no air at all on your body feet or head or anything so the windshield works out really good for the cold weather months so let's look at the the panel here so you can see it's got a EISs now the airspeed turn coordinator basic stuff couple switches over there for my lights this is the flap handle and that's the throttle that's where I mount my phone right here I just run a bear in there this is my mag switch and the e is control buttons are down there as well it's got the the regular cold hammock style seat really comfortable for me I got a half metre back there I got my main power switch back there my fuel tank let's see what else we go on this side you can see I got this extra bottle here that's for my smoke system and goes up to this little transfer pump for RC planes and it basically just pumps baby oil up into my muffler and it makes real nice beautiful smoke for pretty much no cost pretty fun the path got some waning lights on this thing I have bigger tires which actually we're on it when I bought it but if you look at these these are actually trail wolf car corral tires and they are 20 by 7 by 8 and if you look those up they're actually a ATV front tire that somebody has taken and shaved the knobs off of to make them like the buffed Bush tire look and I don't know they're pretty cool 20 inches for this plane it's pretty cool and I fly out of my my backyard here you know it's not perfectly smooth and I pretty much exclusively land on you know unimproved runways so big tires is a big plus for me yeah so since we're down there I can show you the brakes now I made these brakes these are mountain bike brakes I got off eBay I think for $50 for the set and their cable because I already had cable drum brakes but they didn't work for crap so I wanted stronger brakes you know landing in my yard and that kind of thing I needed good break so this is what I came up with I just made just bracket welded it up the hardest part was making this aluminum adapter to adapt the the router to the wheel but I have a lathe and I was able to do that pretty easily and it works amazing and then mine kind of has a unique setup so the cable runs up to the handle on the joystick right here but you can see that I have a split handle so one is opposite of the other and you normally with this poem like that when you're landing but on the ground you get really good at pulling one lever each other and I can spin this thing on one wheel and really you know just get around my yard where it's tighter so highly recommend the disc brakes that are just cable driven it's way way more than this thing needs I had to tone him back because he could flip it over in the nose so I got him dialed back as far as the tension on the cable and they worked great so yeah let's talk about something the back of the plane here okay so here's the tail tail just like any Kolb it's got your guide wires here and to fold this thing it basically is all held together by this single wing nut that ties the two bottom cables together as you can see so you undo that and then you can flip the tails up for storage put them down put that one bolt and wing nut with a safety clip in it and that's it pretty simple stuff there same as any cold I have a hive o3 blade prop and it's the ground adjustable one I've done the tip modification that I found a guide online how to do that and it did improve my speed a couple miles an hour supposedly fuel efficiency and I don't know as a free mod and pretty easy to do I can put the link to that put the you know aerodynamic coming down there a little less drag it's a typical setup it's a Rotex 4 4 7 it's got a Bing 54 carb on it rotecks be box see is this a single ignition got a newer muffle up there and correct I already went through one and cracked it but this one's been holding up really well just a pull start no electric start so this is about you know 40 horsepower and with me in this thing I can easily take off and land in my yard which is only 450 foot and with lots of room to spare the flapper on top with that crew speed is you know typical for ultralight climb with me in it I'm 165 pounds or so and I get on a good day 1200 foot a minute thousand foot a minute on a bad day so pretty good performance 440 horsepower feels like a hot ride with this engine I really like the setup it's my risky biscuits sticker shot out Tucker got let's see who else can I show you oh I just shortened my ailerons my ealer ons were the 15 inch cord you know from here to here was fifteen inches and I was at ash cache with this last summer in Bryan I own the owner of Kolb told me that be a lot less stick pressure for the aileron resistance if I shortened him so I just got done shortening these to ten inches so took five inches it was out here it took five inches off of each aileron just recover them really easy to do so I'm excited to try that out and I putting you a gap seal in it just had like clear packing tape before now I actually use a you know stitched fabric for that like a lot of clubs have so I'm excited to try that out too but yeah that's that's about it you know everything else is pretty standard oh it does have a single strut kind of like a fire star and what they did is I tied both the struts together put them in this little slipstream plastic protector and there's an H brace and the main boom windshield is shut it's okay there's a H brace and the the main spar just like in a fire star and then it goes up and works like that so that's about it I'll give you one last walk around on this thing but if anybody has any other questions I'm happy to talk about Kolb's or ultra lights in general I've been flying this thing for a couple years now and I love it it works out perfectly for my mission and flying out of the backyard really enjoy it highly recommend any cold model the Firefly is just a great you know part 103 ultralight that can have a lot of fun with especially out where I live and there's a lot of a lot of farmland around to buzz around in and nice and safe so there it is cold fire fly pick one up you won't regret it okay guys so I hope you liked that little video of my plane here hope I answered your questions you got any more let's put them in the comments but I'm hoping to actually post some more flying stuff this year just currently we're under the coronavirus lockdown in mission so they're good I'd use this extra time of not doing anything to make a video and I'm hoping to do a lot more flying videos this year I've been flying a lot I just usually don't record it so I'm gonna try to do better with that so stay tuned and I hope I can post some more fun stuff for you alright thanks

Channel: Ben Kairys

Views: 46,739

Rating: 4.8945231 out of 5

Keywords: Kolb Firefly, Ultralight, Airplane, bushplane, part 103

Id: C8RS9nG5gV0

Length: 13min 23sec (803 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 25 2020