I am normally not to good in the writing department, but thought I might be able to input some of my MONI experiences and perhaps someone might derive a little good out of them.
I too had a prop spinner failure, but was lucky and removed it before I lost it in flight. The spinner cracked after about twenty hours and rather than buy another aluminum one, I used the old one for a mold pattern. I taped pieces of aluminum over the openings and then poured it full of plaster of Paris, thus forming a mold. I then draped cellophane over the plaster mold and built my spinner over it with fiberglass. It was probably overkill, but I used four thicknesses of weave. After it cured out it was an easy matter then to fill the weave and cut out for the prop. (I used the old spinner for the pattern, drawing from the inside onto cardboard which I had taped to the outside.) So far I have flown another fifty hours with the spinner and it is holding up good.
A little history on my MONI, N4645A; when I built it we were living in Anchorage Alaska, and after six months of building time, the first flight was on March 15, 1984. Since that time I have only put around seventy hours on it and have done no soaring at all. Oh, I just about always shut the engine down and do a lot of gliding, but Alaska very rarely builds any thermals and around Anchorage there is very little ridges that are suitable. There is some mountain wave, but I have never had any training in that realm of soaring. We recently moved back to Nebraska and hopefully this summer I will be able to fly the MONI as it was intended. I have measured the sink rate many times and on a fifty degree day with no lift it sinks at real close to 280 FPM. The stall indicates 40 MPH, cruise at 5700 RPM (where mine seems to run the best) is close to 100 MPH. Wide open is 6300 RPM and 110 MPH. By the way, before I riveted the wings it would cruise at 110 and max out at 125.
On the subject of riveting, if anyone is interested, there is a very sure way of drilling the ribs dead center every time without peeling the skins and de-bonding. Not wanting to pull the skins off and possibly destroying the wings, I came up with a way that worked very well for me. The only penalty was the loss of about 10MPH. The sink rate didn't seem to suffer tho, and with a little clean up in other places I think I can get the speed back.
There have been many instances, experiences, modifications, problems etc. that I could and will relate to later on, but one that I will this time, concerns a problem I thought I had with my BMR carburetor. When I first started flying N4645A, every time after lift-off and just when I committed to the flight, the engine would start running very rough. (Always when I was over dense woods) the only thing that seemed to smooth it out was to back off on the throttle and get it into the mid range. Of course that meant less power when I needed all that I could get. It never did quit, but it sure didn't make me feel very comfortable. I would always return and land and readjust the carburetor and the static run up always went beautiful without so much as a sputter. I made phone calls, wrote letters and talked to everyone that had any knowledge at all of two strokes, but could not find the problem, till one day I happened to notice that at max throttle setting, I was about 1/8INCH short of reaching the stop on the carburetor. It has run beautiful since. Pretty stupid, Huh? The way I figure it is that during the static run up I was just barely reaching into the high jet. But during the climbout and at arriving at about 70MPH, there was enough additional wind and maybe the climb angle was enough to cause the throttle to retard to the transition point from high to low jet. A couple of good things came out of this. The first is that I will pay a little more attention to detail, and the second is that during the time I was having the problems, I installed mixture levers for both jets that I can control during flight and an EGT which I will never ever be without again. That has got to be the most valuable instrument there is on a two stroke.
Well I've rambled enough. As I said earlier, I am really looking forward to the next newsletter and hope everyone will continue to tell of their MONI experiences. I especially hope there is someone nearby that is a builder/flyer that is interested in swapping a few MONI stories.
Ron Fisher
"Live long and fly safe ..."
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