- Joined
- Dec 15, 2014
- Messages
- 16
- Reaction score
- 7
I'm new here having just joined and posted as suggested by a close friend of Mark Dickey, (forum member bf92, Danny) who is selling his S-1C project (Pitts S-1C project for sale).
It led me to be pleasantly suprised with pictures of one of my projects, N371WS. So, I'll post a few 'points of interest' about it.
First, SMILEN was a factory new Pitts S1S bought by Paula Trahan, who placed 2nd at the Oshkosh World Aerobatic Championship. She also let Pam Lock of New Zealand fly it there.
Some time later I completely rebuilt N371WS putting it into the Experimental Exhibition category. A partial list of the mods:
Pressure cowl, spring gear, zero incidence wing mounting, sealed aileron gaps, side opening canopy, 'scrotum' fuselage*, quick rudder pedal shorteners (Paula was really short), custom paint scheme, et al.
*I got a lot of kidding and someone coined the term "scrotum Pitts" when I removed the belly formers and created a fiberglass faring to cover just the aileron-tail-feathers control assembly. This was done to get rid of the 'guppy' belly for better scoring of verticals by competition judges (an inherent Pitts handicap).
The swing over canopy was my one-off design, i.e. I didn't kit it (to answer that forum question in another thread).
The paint scheme's appearance is totally different inside vs outside the hanger. I mixed all 3 colors with metal flake (aluminum powder) and no picture does it justice, IMHO. Here's one I took:
As you can see, the camera still didn't show the metalflake in the blue (nor in the red nor gold for that matter).
This is a repeat pic from another thread, but better than mine, I think:
It led me to be pleasantly suprised with pictures of one of my projects, N371WS. So, I'll post a few 'points of interest' about it.
First, SMILEN was a factory new Pitts S1S bought by Paula Trahan, who placed 2nd at the Oshkosh World Aerobatic Championship. She also let Pam Lock of New Zealand fly it there.
Some time later I completely rebuilt N371WS putting it into the Experimental Exhibition category. A partial list of the mods:
Pressure cowl, spring gear, zero incidence wing mounting, sealed aileron gaps, side opening canopy, 'scrotum' fuselage*, quick rudder pedal shorteners (Paula was really short), custom paint scheme, et al.
*I got a lot of kidding and someone coined the term "scrotum Pitts" when I removed the belly formers and created a fiberglass faring to cover just the aileron-tail-feathers control assembly. This was done to get rid of the 'guppy' belly for better scoring of verticals by competition judges (an inherent Pitts handicap).
The swing over canopy was my one-off design, i.e. I didn't kit it (to answer that forum question in another thread).
The paint scheme's appearance is totally different inside vs outside the hanger. I mixed all 3 colors with metal flake (aluminum powder) and no picture does it justice, IMHO. Here's one I took:
As you can see, the camera still didn't show the metalflake in the blue (nor in the red nor gold for that matter).
This is a repeat pic from another thread, but better than mine, I think:
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