Hello everyone,
I have been lurking here for the past several months reading all the
very interesting posts by everyone. Great stuff!
As a little background, I am a 30 year old Aeronautical Engineer, as is
my wife, Sue. We live in West Bend, Wisconsin with our 2 English Cocker
Spaniels, Misty and Waldo. I work at a Medical Equipment manufacturer
as a Design Engineer and my wife works for Midwest Express Airlines in
Milwaukee as an Project Engineer. Yes, I'm a little jealous. She LOVES
her job.
We have always thought of building a plane but really never knew what we
wanted, until we went to Oshkosh '98. There we saw Ivan talk about the
Europa XS, and we were sold on the spot. Sue had picked out this plane
---From reading Kitplanes, as she liked the monowheel and the overall
looks.
After listening to the wonderful talk by Ivan, we decided that oneday we
were going to build one, and spent the next year thinking and planning.
Well, this year we went again to Oshkosh and spent a lot of time in the
Europa booth talking to Bob and Michele from Florida and some of the
factory gents that came over. To sum it up, we ordered Stage 1 of the
XS monowheel kit and it should be arriving at our door Monday. Needless
to say, we are very excited.
We have been busy sealing the basement floor, getting materials to build
the work table, flourescent lights, wiring outlets, etc. I plan to have
a lot of the work done indoors before taking it to the garage, as
Wisconsin winters are long and cold, perfect building weather, and to
heat a 2 car garage would be a formidable task.
One question at this point: would it be valuable to invest in an epoxy
pump, or does the Europa "weight balance" work satisfactorily? Paul
McAllister is a local builder here in Wisconsin that we've visited some
time ago, and suggested that it works just fine. We will be visiting
him again soon to see his progress.
That's about it for now. I'm sure we will be dropping in often.
There's a lot of good info here.
Chris and Susan Beck
see my "other" hobby on our web page: http://www.execpc.com/~n9zes
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