Super STOL FLIGHT! and Build Tour - STOL IT Aircraft

alright ready let's do it today I'll give you a tour of the Builder assist company called stole it aircraft and then take you along for a flight and adjust aircraft superstone [Music] [Music] do I even need to do an intro okay so today I'm at stolen aircraft a little town of Fairplay South Carolina Fairplay what a fitting name my name is Chris Griffin I'm the owner stoled aircraft we are just aircraft dealer and we do custom builds and builder assists here at our facility and Fairplay this is our our shop our runway is behind us we build about three or four planes a year and we try and get people into aviation as much as possible so Chris what is maybe one of the first few steps when a kit arrives to you before you start the build or build assist process well the kit usually comes either and a crate or you can pick it up at the factory similar to this with all the material packed into it get home you unpack it into a good inventory list first to make sure you're not missing any parts after you get all that done you're you're sure you got everything you need we typically start on doing like the floor pans so you'll you'll cut the floor pans down make them fit drill them up size them deburr um and then we start going from there up to just doing things like putting the flat panel in building our seats doing some of our battery tray and ELT tray which typically go back here doing some of the basic rigging on the elevator that push pull tubes doing your stringers hi Saul on these in and getting those ready for fabric we get to that point we do some of the brakes rudder pedals that assembly and of course we tear it all apart before we start covering we generally start covering with some of the smaller parts the elevator horizontal stab it gives people a little bit of a chance to get used to doing the covering process and if they mess up they can tear it off without having a huge piece like the fuselage then we'll move on to maybe doing flaps and ailerons and then start on the fuselage once you get to that point and what process do you use both fabric and glue and paint for your your builds we use about everything but probably the most popular is doing poly fiber and super flight paint on top but there's multiple products out there that you can use you can use about anything that suits your fancy and about how long does it take to cover one of these aircraft and you can finish it I usually say you know the cover you're probably gonna be thirty days to do all the covering of all the parts is probably pretty close you know by the time you do the finish tapes and all the all the all the processes it takes to cover something you can do a you know a basic cover of a elevator in a couple hours but by the time you do all the finish tapes and everything it takes a day or so so you're probably the 30 days to cover an airplane covering the wings is that kind of a classic style is a rib stitching involved or how do you cover these wings we we don't use RIP stitching what we do do is use a rivet nowadays we use rivets and every other hole instead of it stitching it takes a little less time a little less complicated and it works just as well you're living the fabric yeah no you basically what you do is you'll lay your fabric down and once your fabrics on and it's shrunk you'll go ahead and melt holes every other hole where these are and then you put a reinforcement tape on it and then you rip it to the reinforcement tape so it doesn't burn through the fabric and then of course your finish tapes go over that when you're done so to explain first of all the difference is there's a couple different wing options apparently from the super stole to the Highlander so if you explain what the differences are first on that the airframes for the Highlander in the super stole and the escapades I'll have the exact same airframe they're all the 4130 chromoly steel they are exactly the same as far as that goes the wings are different the Highlander has a wood rib under cammer more traditional wing the super skull is a metal rib flat bottom wing the biggest difference is the super stoles have slats and spoilers on them which give you really good stability at low speeds the Highlander is a little bit faster it has a traditional stall characteristic the standard wing for the Highlander way comes from the factory it's just like this with the ribs set and nothing else done you can it takes you know it probably takes you a hundred hours maybe not quite a hundred hours to completely build a set of wings if you get it at that stage you can do some factory options as a quick build which will give you stage 2 or stage 3 meaning you'll have part of the wing built for you or they can completely build it for you and have it ready to cover the super skull is basically the same way it comes from the factory as a as a stage 1 with just the ribs just like this stage 2 is the way this wing sits which has the front leading edge skins on it has the slats are already set to the wing the wings have been set to the fuselage and then you do some finish work as far as skins and rigging and the remainder that way you can also get a quick build ready to cover wing as well yes so once we once we get some of the covering done will generally start thinking about doing the paint process and will you'd like to paint the fuselage first if we do the fuselage once you get that painted you can start really bolting stuff on and get that sense of its finally coming together after all your hard work so we'll get the fuselage painted start mounting the engine and doing some of that stuff paint process is a little bit taxing but it's it's always a fun thing you know get to pick your colors and you see that you know that final paint job come to life and see what your vision was we just decided to try this paint booth which is an inflatable paint booth we found I haven't had time to build a permanent paint booth yet here but we're gonna do that next but this paint booth is about 1,500 bucks we found it on ebay it's inflatable and it seems to work really good so we're gonna give it a try we've had other people say they've had good luck with it and it's a great option because when you've done painting you can deflate it roll it up and put it in your garage and you don't have to have it and take it up a lot of space awesome explain to me just the one next level you did to this because it is inflatable just to keep a little safety factor in case the power1 out what did you do as a safety thirty-eight build some of these trusses basically in here to keep it we when we were looking at these online we saw some people that did have power outages and of course their booth collapse on their paint job which would be a terrible thing when it comes to an airplane so we decided to build these little trusses just in case you lose power and it holds the booth open as you see it's not even running and we can kind of paint without even having the air flow on so once it comes back out of paint we'll start being able to bolt stuff on that's where you finally start to see you know some progress being made you can start bolting your rudder pedals back in finally you can put your seats in put your flap handles in we have you know the nice thing about experimental is you get a lot of options you can basically if your mind can think of it you can do it on an experimental you're not really held regulations as a certified type certificated aircraft so we wanted like on this airplane I wanted windows so we put windows here some guys don't like the windows so they don't but we you know if you can think it and you want it you can do it with these aircraft so we can start putting the windows on our turtle deck back on start doing all the interior fabric on these we generally use like a carpet on the interior baggage compartment and on the floor and on our floor pans and then once you get to that point you could start mounting your engine and doing all your a V onyx and that's you know that's a little time-consuming but you get that part done and then there's not a whole lot left after that you can start doing all your finished stuff you know all the small parts landing gear things of that nature and getting it wrapped up okay jumping ahead a little bit this is a finished product here being that you're kind of mid build over there let's talk engines for a minute what has been the most popular and over the years how many different platforms have you installed as an engine we've done a bunch of different engines but the most common engine is the Rotax 912 ULS hundred horse engine it's about the standard when it comes to these airplanes although you always get these guys that want to do something exotic and try something new the 912 has generally been the engine most people choose it's got a good reputation that's been out there for a long time so you know most guys don't want to tinker with their engine all the time so that's what they usually go with although you can put any engine on the this airplane and what has been the popular prop and prop size so anywhere from the Kiev is what we generally use the Kiev gives you some adjustability its ground adjustable so you can do you know good takeoff climb performance or you can get cruise performance out of it with just adjusting the pitch of the prop which doesn't take but a few minutes we also use the Cato prop if you want a fix pitch propeller Cato's are really very good popular propeller if you're finding value in this video hit the like button on this video and it's really important that you subscribe as it helps me get sponsors like air works kit plane parts Acme arrow edge performance engines and Viking aircraft engines and be sure to check out the links in the description below for special offers from our affiliates let's jump back in so the super stall is a very unique airplane Troy when he designed this airplane he wanted to take the pilot safety into consideration so he basically used an old technology that commercial aircraft use and the old Helio Courier use which is slats the nice thing about his slats is these things are basically automatic you don't have to do anything to get them to deploy you basically raising those get you a high angle of attack and the slats will deploy these things will help you at very very low speeds it has helps the air stick to the wing so you don't install an aircraft and they are very very forgiving they make this airplane fly with a lot of forgiveness the other nice things on this airplane are the big giant Fowler flaps for these basically I call them barn doors because you're so darn big which can also also help you slow down the other thing on this airplane is if you come around to the back and you look over top of the wing when you get down to very low speeds you lose your roll rate at very low speeds because you're not getting enough airflow over the wing so when that started to come a problem he came up with another idea and put spoilers in the wings if you see the black things on top of the wing those are the spoilers so when you get the very low speeds that spoiler will pop up and it'll kill the lift on that side of the wing we're going to talk a little bit about the tail wheel on this airplane this actually has what it's called jim piccola is the guy that designed that tail wheel it's a lockable it's full cast ring and it's a friction lock tail wheel friction lock meaning you can set the tension on the tail wheel if I pick up the tail of the airplane and try and spin that tail wheel you almost have to kick it to get it to move so that's an adjustable tension lock you can make it looser or heavier the locking part of it is was just ingenious because guys you know we're having problems with crown looping airplanes especially tail draggers are just kind of inherently unstable as far as takeoff and landings so he designed this locking feature which has a pin right here that basically locks into the end of the wheel so if you line up on the runway you push a lever in the cockpit and you Center that wheel it'll lock in place and then when you come into land as long as you have your stick back and you land that tail wheel is gonna remain in the straight forward position so you don't have any problems with ground looping so this is the locking mechanism all you have to do is flip this over that way and now the tail wheel is locked you Center it on the runway that pin will push in and your tail wheel is locked when you land and you want a taxi you just flip it back to unlock and the tail wheel unlocks and you can turn is you would win you're taxing a regular airplane okay so Chris is gonna show us real quick what it's like to swing of wing on one of these so we basically just take it off this turtle deck and this is all cable and pulleys apparently yeah so we just take this clevis pin out right here let the wing light drive this pin out pull the pin now the wings ready to rotate back and then right here we have a way to call a travel strut which attacked is from right here on the wing back to the tail and that will hold it for transport so if you need to take it on trailer you know put it on the back of your camp or whatever you want to do you can do that and the wing won't move [Music] [Music] all right ready that's good [Music] [Music] mr. tester [Music] we got to add power here to make it over the hill please land it up that on the downhill how many plans you've ever landed downhill on [Music] [Music] now these slats when I was talking about these slats and this thing stalling if you look at our angle of attack right there yeah and look at the edge of the wing I mean the word yeah that's crazy I Brown speeds 24 miles an hour 23 and we're just stable it's gonna be I mean that's crazy angle of attack right there and it's not one to stall it's not want to do anything stupid now I'll let it over a little bit but you can you can cross control you can do anything you want with this thing and it's not gonna do anything stupid with them slats nothing a man's just died it's almost like a simulator feel to it it really is it's crazy what it'll do better chicken farm off the left wing there yep my neighbors too though the guy with the horses has four chicken houses so I gonna say with this airplane slats equal flaps if your slats are out you're good flaps speech there we go and flaps beats but then you have to really power in or it goes down you get a really great drag atop but now we're in a stall I mean with the slats out you're in a stall you're basically in a full stall right now but that's how we land this airplane is that a full stall but you get really slow I mean you look we're doing 35 miles an hour on approach that's pretty low you know [Music] we ever back [Music] that's awesome [Music] all right Chris well thanks for the tour how can people get in touch with you if they'd like to see about getting builder assistance or buy one of these you can email us at just stole it calm or you excuse me just stole it at yahoo.com we're on Facebook as well and we do have a website that's being developed right now and we'll get that out to you guys as soon as we're done with it all right thanks again I hope you've enjoyed this episode remember to Like and subscribe I'll see you in the next episode thanks for watching remember to check out our podcasts on pot bean iTunes and Google Play [Music]

Channel: Experimental Aircraft Channel

Views: 325,951

Rating: 4.9274974 out of 5

Keywords: stol, stol drag, stol drags, stol aircraft, stol competition, just aircraft, just aircraft highlander, highlander, superstol, steve henry, kitfox, rotax, reno air race, homebuilt, homebuilt aircraft, light sport, lsa, light sport aircraft, experimental aircraft, kitplane, kitplanes, trent palmer, mike patey, flying cowboys, diy, diy project, diy projects, diy kits, flying, fly, pilot, flight training, experimental aircraft channel, airshow, how its made, how to, how to build

Id: SJSFiMt6VJw

Length: 19min 16sec (1156 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 12 2020