Drawings and prints

S

sillsaviation

New member
Years ago (15) I started a Cruisair restore project and bought a set of blue prints from the club. I now have two Cruisemasters to do. Are there prints and drawings out here for the Cruisemaster ? Will the AA LLC sell a set of drawings ?
Has anyone a set they will part with ?

Joe Sills
 
I'd just give them a call, Joe. They've not been strange when I needed drawings of the rudder system and the hydraulic system.

The reason I used the word, strange, is because when I needed to do my push-pull thing with the Luscombe they (Luscombe Foundation, now defunct) made me sign all sorts of legal papers saying I would not use the drawings they sold me for profit....yeah, like I was going to make a fracking fortune selling an STC for a control system that enables pilots with one leg to fly Luscombes....oy!

Jonathan
 
Joe,

I'd give them a call.

I haven't dealt with the new group, as far as drawings go, but the previous owners were usually pretty good about providing copies of drawings for the 14-19.

The big problem seemed to be that they didn't really know what they had for anything prior to the 14-19-3 and often had to spend a while looking.

That improved somewhat in the 90s when one of their mechanics owned a 14-19 and spent a lot of his off-time digging through the drawings trying to catalog what they had on the early models. He eventually left the company, so that resource is gone.

The new head engineer, Andy Vano, has a 14-19, so we now have another resource at the plant.

I never had a real problem in the past about getting individual drawings for areas of interest, but I'm not sure how happy they would be to part with a complete set. (If they even have a complete set in one spot.)

By the way, I was down in Austin in 2004 doing some contract work with Freescale and stopped by your operation a few times. I usually had to sneak away at lunch time and always seemed to miss you.

You had a 14-19 fuselage on sawhorses at the time, stripped down to the tubing. I was interested in it as I have a 14-19 project in the same condition.

I do have a question for any 14-19 owners or anyone who has rebuilt one:

On the steel tubing right behind the baggage compartment, there are four tabs welded to each of the longerons. These tabs all point to the one that is diagonal from it - that is, the top left tab points to the bottom right tab. All four tabs have a nice half inch or so round hole in the middle. The one in Tom's shop had grommets in the holes. Mine had nothing in the hole.

Does anybody know what these tabs, holes, and grommets were used for?

Thanks,

Dave York

Is this the project that you are working on?
 
I tried for a set of drawings 4 years ago and got a polite screw you. I hope you have better luck. I must say that i did get some help with certain drawings from Carroll in parts AAC. My 2 cent input. LYNN N9818B :?
 
Dave,
My 14-19 has the same tabs, and no grommets. Nothing was attached to the tabs, when I disassembled the plane. I thought they were something to do with the optional flare kit that was offered by Bellanca. I've got s/n 2007.
Tom
 
Crumast,

Wow, you have an early one. Mine is S/N 2010.

S/N 2000 was a model 14/14 military trainer, if I recall correctly. It was restored by Harvey Leydecker in the Birmingham, AL area and now resides up in Kent, Washington.

As far as I know, there may only be two earlier ones than yours still flying.

S/N 2001 was the one that Leighton Collins wrote up in a 1950 Air Facts issue, I think. N6550N is listed in Oregon, the last I looked. It is still on the FAA books, but I don't know if it is still flying.

S/N 2005 was owned by Jan Gerstner in Wisconsin when I joined the club back in the 90s. It now has a new owner whom I haven't met yet.

S/N 2009 and 2011 are still flying, as far as I know. I visited 2011 up in Tacoma, Wash area years ago. I have pictures on my office wall. It now lives in Wisconsin, if I recall correctly. The last I heard, 2009 was in Minnesota.

Where are you located?

Dave York
york40@bellsouth.net
Daphne, AL
 
Crumast,

About our mysterious tabs with holes and grommets.

I had an offline e-mail conversation with Joe Sills. Joe says that the tabs with holes and grommets are very likely the attachment for an old loop antenna, widely used in the period when our planes were built.

He says that he has seen similar loop antenna fittings in several other vintage airplanes of the period.

Dave York
 
Could be an antenna mount, although it seems like overkill. Mine had the remnants of some kind of foil-type antenna mounted against the inside upper surface, between the spars in the wing.
Anyway, Dave, my plane is located at Grand Prairie, Tx. Near Dallas. Just finished the 9-year rebuild last April. 3600 hrs of work, and I'm glad it's behind me. Tom
 
Mine has the same foil type antenna in one wing, three very thin aluminum sheets attached to the inner surface of the plywood wing with wires soldered from each sheet to the next outboard one. No sign of wiring to the wing root is left.

The VOR antenna appears to be made out of very stiff aluminum rod and is attached on a wood mount to the inside of the bottom access plate on the wing. Very old hand-twisted-pair wiring is attached to the antenna, goes to the rear spar, then disappears somewhere in the deep, dark recesses of the wing. It never makes it to the wing root either.

As a former broadcast engineer, I got the impression that the foil antenna was probably a low frequency communications antenna, but I could be wrong.

I don't know what kind of antennas were used with the old A/N quadrant radio ranges, and, alas, my favorite source of aeronautical knowledge from that period has "flown west."

Dave York
 
Dave:

My gure in such matters remains "on the beam" and I will ask him. Pretty smart system, those A/N radio ranges - navigation by ear rather than by adding to your scan. But that was before radio traffic was intense.

Jonathan
 
I have seen these flanges on the tubing on all three of my pre-1951 Bellancas --- but NOT on the 1959 Downer 14-19-3 I had.

I don't know of any standard type antennae that would use a mount so far inside the fuselage frame. Some high frequency radio equipment that were bulky tube type systems might have been mounted there, but those where typically only needed for oceanic flights and needed a long aerial on a crank mount. (like the antennae that broke on Emilia Erhart's last fatal flight).

So ...I made the assumption that they were for mounting the bracket that held the flairs that were required before the 50's on all planes that were to be flown at night. But, Bellanca DID have an optional LARGER aux fuel tank (not the 14.5 gallon behind the seat one), which I have never seen in any of the older planes.


Tim
 
Tim,

Somewhere I saw a drawing of a larger aux. fuel tank. It mounted in the same place as the the 14 gal one. The best way to describe it is that it looked like the 14 gal one with a large bulge at the base that ran that extended forward under the rear seat. I believe that it was a 19 or 20 gal tank. I guess they ran it forward under the seat rather than rearward under the baggage compartment for CG purposes.

As for antennas, most all radio equipment in light planes was Low Frequency stuff and was not as sensitive to being buried deep in fabric structures. The general rule is that the higher the frequency, the more easily the signal is blocked by structure.

With the '50 Cruisemaster, VORs and their receivers were just coming on line so most planes still had the older Low Frequency rigs.

Dave
 
Jan Gerstner had one of those 25 gallon aux tanks but he replaced it with the smaller one for a variety of reasons. The person who bought his airplane immediately stuck the larger tank back into the airplane as he wanted the extra range and he is flying his 'Master straight and level. Jan, as you probably know, took his into all manner of back country strips. Weight is the chief concern there.

Jonathan
S/N 2014
 
I have these tabs in my Cruisair. There are grommets in them and a wire is wrapped through them three times to form a large square and then the wire goes forward. It looks to me to be an old antenna.

Kevin
 
This is a new reply to some old posts. I got quite a laugh hearing about the four welded tabs on the inside of the longerons in back of the luggage box. In all the 14-13 series up to my 14-19-2, this was the mount for a fixed ADF loop. You turned the whole airplane to find the null and find your way. Cut 'em off and save 2 oz.
 
I can confirm the mounts were indeed for a loop antenna. Mine still had it installed when I stripped it down. Don't get too excited- it was merely multiple loops of 18 ga. wire in a square. Still- according to the previous owner, it worked quite well!
I don't plan on using an ADF, so I pulled the old wire and its accompanying extension tubes and layed them aside.
 
Dan;
Was RADIO COMPASS the name of the fixed loop system, where you have to change heading with the air frame to get the null?
As in the loop antanae that was held by the tabs we are posting about? :?:
 
We are digging into ancient technology. I am not an expert. However, By rotating the loop, as seen in most '30s and '40s photos of aircraft, you could determine the direction of the signal. If you have a fixed loop as seen in early Bellancas, you had to rotate the airplane about it's vertical axis to get the same results. "Modern" technology allowed a needle on an instrument to point to the source of the signal. Good g-d, can some radio freaks help me out on this topic........I'm out of my realm. Dan
 
I did a little digging on the net and found this site that describes early radio navigation.

http://www.navfltsm.addr.com/ndb-nav-history.htm

The fixed loop in our Bellanca is indeed part of the RADIO COMPASS system. There was an indicator in the cockpit that show whether the airplane was pointed directly toward the radio station. If pointed right at the station, the needle in the indicator would be centered. If the station was to the left or right of the airplane heading, the needle would point to the left or right, depending on which way the plane needed to turn to be aligned with the station. To get a bearing to a station, the plane had to be turned until the needle centered, then the course to the station would be the current airplane heading.

Mechanical direction finders also came on the scene about the same time, so the loop could be manually rotated to line up with a station and the relative bearing to the station from the plane could be determined. This was the Direction Finding system. Later enhancements provided motor controls so that a motor could turn the loop and these became the first Automatic Direction Finder systems (ADF).

Later, the advent of transistor and integrated circuit electronics eventually allowed for the removal of the mechanical loop from the system and the bearing was determined from a fixed loop mechanism by electronic means.

But by then VOR and, later, GPS had become the primary radio navigation systems.

Dave York
 
Then in addition to the fixed loop, there must have also been a sense antennae, like a wire from the cabin top to the tip of the tail?
I have a picture of a Cruisemaster panel that includes a Radio Compass indicator. So I presume that some A/C had them as late as 1958?
 
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