Solomon Aircraft Factory

Building Cozy Mk IV s/n 1169

Welcome to the Solomon Aircraft Factory

"He's Doing WHAT?"

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A Little History

The Cozy Mk4 is a single engine, four-place  aircraft constructed with composite materials. The building technique - moldless composite construction was advanced by Burt Rutan and Mike Melvill in the 70's. Rutan designed many aircraft in his long career, including the LongEZ, Voyager, and SpaceShipOne . The Voyager flew around the world non-stop in 9 days in 1986 with Dick Rutan and Jeana Yeager at the controls, and more recently, in 2004, SpaceShipOne became the first privately funded manned aircraft to enter space making its pilot Mike Melvill the first "civilian" astronaut. The LongEZ, a popular home-built two-seat aircraft was the basis for the design of the Cozy Mk4 by Nat Puffer.

During the 1980's, Nat Puffer used the LongEZ as a starting point for his design of a three-place Cozy, and later designed a four-place version. The Cozy Mk4 is constructed according to Puffer's plans using raw materials like fiberglass, foam, epoxy resins, wood, aluminum, and steel which are obtained from various suppliers. The project typically takes four or more years to complete.

The standard engine is a 180 HP Lycoming O-360, and it's mounted in the rear of the aircraft. Control surfaces are located on the canard,  winglets, and wings. The plane is equipped with a landing brake on the belly. The main gear is fixed, but the nose gear retracts for flight, or for parking. I plan to install a 13B Rotary Engine and fully retractable gears.

Rotary Engines

The Basics
Like a piston engine, the rotary engine uses the pressure created when a combination of air and fuel is burned. In a piston engine, that pressure is contained in the cylinders and forces pistons to move back and forth. The connecting rods and crankshaft convert the reciprocating motion of the pistons into rotational motion that can be used to power a car.

In a rotary engine, the pressure of combustion is contained in a chamber formed by part of the housing and sealed in by one face of the triangular rotor, which is what the engine uses instead of pistons.


The rotor and housing of a rotary engine from a Mazda RX-7: These parts replace the pistons, cylinders, valves, connecting rods and camshafts found in piston engines.

The rotor follows a path that looks like something you'd create with a Spirograph. This path keeps each of the three peaks of the rotor in contact with the housing, creating three separate volumes of gas. As the rotor moves around the chamber, each of the three volumes of gas alternately expands and contracts. It is this expansion and contraction that draws air and fuel into the engine, compresses it and makes useful power as the gases expand, and then expels the exhaust.

Producing Power
Rotary engines use the four-stroke combustion cycle, which is the same cycle that four-stroke piston engines use. But in a rotary engine, this is accomplished in a completely different way.

The heart of a rotary engine is the rotor. This is roughly the equivalent of the pistons in a piston engine. The rotor is mounted on a large circular lobe on the output shaft. This lobe is offset from the centerline of the shaft and acts like the crank handle on a winch, giving the rotor the leverage it needs to turn the output shaft. As the rotor orbits inside the housing, it pushes the lobe around in tight circles, turning three times for every one revolution of the rotor.

If you watch carefully, you'll see the offset lobe on the output shaft spinning three times for every complete revolution of the rotor.

As the rotor moves through the housing, the three chambers created by the rotor change size. This size change produces a pumping action. Let's go through each of the four strokes of the engine looking at one face of the rotor.

The Four Strokes

Intake
The intake phase of the cycle starts when the tip of the rotor passes the intake port. At the moment when the intake port is exposed to the chamber, the volume of that chamber is close to its minimum. As the rotor moves past the intake port, the volume of the chamber expands, drawing air/fuel mixture into the chamber. (more)

 

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