Taking a break from pheasant hunting for a ride in the new Tundra. Flying off the farm at Conde, South Dakota.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_20qaBiCg1M

Looks like a very nice performing plane. The Tundra that they always display at Oshkosh catches my eye everytime I walk by it. They seem to have copied Murphy to a degree.
Since you are in SD you'll have to come up my way sometime for a BS session. I'm on the east side of Itasca State Park.
Keith

WWhunter,
Thanks for the invite. Sounds like a great place up in the northern lakes. Summers comin'.
The Tundra was supposedly a clean sheet design but there are similar lines in the Bush Caddy too. Although the Bush Caddy is a straight fuselage while the Tundra, because of its high lift wing and lower stall and landing speeds requires raising the tail by use of compound angles in the lower fuselage just behind the pilot seat to allow the wing to reach a higher angle of attack at landing without striking the tail wheel or having really long main gear. (Extreme example is the Feissler Storch) Although long gear is nearly a non issue when you're sitting high on floats, wheel landings on long gear with crosswinds cause ground handling to become compromised. South Dakota is a different wind every day.
Raising of the tail with compound angles allows the whole plane's cg to be lowered down to the ground and allows use of the shorter Grove spring gear set 8 ft apart for exceptional ground stability and differential braking/steering. The Quest Kodiak also uses the same engineering principle to accomplish higher angles of attack at landing while keeping the gear shorter.
But you are right in that the two place Murphy Rebel shares a similar outline to the 4 place Tundra. Other than that the GW's , construction and the Tundra's Harry Riblett wing performance envelopes are very different and Murphy offers nothing in the four place 2550 GW category and the Moose jumps way up to 3500 GW.
I think when it comes to aluminum construction, home builders are limited by the amount of roll that can be easily done in a fuselage skin and in these three designs it produces flat sides and top with rolled corners so it is going to make for a similar fuselage outline. But Internally and structurally the Rebel, Bush Caddy and Tundra are very different. The other choice with aluminum is Zenair's approach with all flat panels in their 701, 750, 801 series. I don't know of any homebuilts that are using Cessna's rolled type tail cone. I think that would require heavy equipment to roll.
Right now I am sharing builder info with another Tundra builder, kit # 12, up in Yellowknife, NT. He used the I O 390 Lycoming with polished ports for 225 hp and an MT prop. It is looking like a great combination. Our four cylinder engine weights are not that different but his TAS number is 145 mph at 2500 rpm and 25 inches. My cruise is 2500 rpm and 128 mph with the 180 hp and a fixed pitch Sensenich. I could stand to pitch steeper but I like the takeoffs. It takes me about 500 feet on grass in this video to get off with full fuel and two 200+ lb passengers at 1400MSL. Of course there are faster planes but in the Tundra you need to get below 50 mph to even use full flaps and it won't stall until about 30 with power off. But this is not a power off landing speed because it will take power to arrest the sink but in performance for a four place with 1150 useful, it weeds out a lot of the competition.
In the video there is about a 20 mph wind at a slight right crosswind with occasional gusts and it was just two days after another two inch rain delaying soybean harvest and I taxied through water in the low spots to get to the hill top where I took off so the ground was soft. We had 16 inches of rain last October which is more than this area normally gets in an entire season. You can see flooded fields all around. The dirt road I normally use is all cut up from hunter traffic so I used the grass and dodged the gopher mounds the best I could. I am using 8.50 X 6.00 mains and a 2200 AK tailwheel (formally Scott 2200).
Hope to see you next summer.