I saw info about stretching a pacer and changing the wing. This was licensed as an expermental. I have lost the contact info. Can anyone help.?

Yea it is the bushmaster. Some are experimental but other have STCs. The most common one is the BM 180. I did see a exp. Bushmaster that had a 300hp IO-540 once.

Reuben

there is one for sale on barnstormers $80K nice pics

There's also the Dakota slotted wing in works. There are two flying with it, one stretched and one not. Another version besides the bushmaster is the producer.

Were you looking at this clipper?

http://www.barnstormers.com/classified_ ... DUCED.html

Looks pretty sweet to me.

Unusual choice of engines on that long-winged Clipper (O-300)-- musta been built by an old C170 guy.
A Pacer is a good-flying airplane. adding squared-off extended wingtips gives them more wing area which doesn't hurt. This would really be a nice mod if combined wth moving the ailerons outboard for better roll control. I think this is sorta what you end up with, with that Dakota wing, plus probably a slotted leading edge, that seems to be their thing.

There is also a guy up here in AK building a stretched Pacer he calls a Producer. Don't have contact info, but you can find him over at www.shortwingpipers.org. He builds certified and experimental planes that seem to perform quite well.

Look up Eddie Trimmer in Willow, AK. He is the Pacer mod guy, he's got STC's for a lot of things from wing extensions, flap and aileron extensions, supercub gear, fuel system mods and really nice seaplane doors.

He has a website (Trimmeraviation.com) I think. Wonderful guy very helpful and very knowledgable.

Stickman wrote:Look up Eddie Trimmer in Willow, AK. He is the Pacer mod guy, he's got STC's for a lot of things from wing extensions, flap and aileron extensions, supercub gear, fuel system mods and really nice seaplane doors.

He has a website (Trimmeraviation.com) I think. Wonderful guy very helpful and very knowledgable.

The wing / aileron stuff isn't approved yet, paperwork was filed months ago but hasn't gotten any further.

Rich Roberts out of Ft. Collins built up one based on Pacer components, but stretched wing and fuselage. He still has it, and it's a real good performer. Experimental, as he built WAY over 50%, including wings, from scratch.

Thanks. cubscout

I think the Pacer is a pretty good airplane without streching it- that's a helluva lot of work. There are smaller less drastic ways to improve it--like fatter tires, Sutton exhaust, Odyssey battery, Borer prop, etc. Easy to add wing area with extended tips but then you have the aileron pretty far in from the end which doesn't help the roll rate any. Extending the wings one rib's worth, adding a short squared-off tip, moving the ailerons outboard, and extending the flaps outboard would make quite an improvement, but is pretty involved. I believe that's pretty much what Trimmer's got in the works for a possible STC. Might be a lot more bang for the buck to just add VG's & leave the round wingtips alone.

Some things to consider when investing high $$$ into a tube and fabric plane:

The best Pacers are PA 22-20 conversions with the univaire wide gear kit. Since there was always a finite life to the older facbric and covering processes, an owner could justify making lots of great modifications to their planes to include the wingtips and taildragger conversions during the recovering process. At the time it was also real easy to get field approvals for modifications.

My 51 PA 22-20 had so many STC and modifications from HP upgrade STC to the tailwheel conversion, bagage door and plilot side pop out window. I baught it for $19,500 in 2006.

To take a TriPacer today and accomplish the same thing it would cost more money than the plane would ever be realistically valued at. The one on Barnstormers may have $80K into it, but I could by a C 180 for that. My good friend is neck deep into a Bushmaster and its gonna cost him twice what he could pay for a comperable turn key purchase (Maule or other) by his own admission. The wonderful thing about the Pacer is that you can buy on and mosdestl;y modify it to make it a great plane for like $25 K. I agree with the previous post. The Pacer is prett good by itself. For those who need a mission specific airplane, it may be more feasible to build one since anything they would buy may need modification.

hotrod150 wrote:Might be a lot more bang for the buck to just add VG's & leave the round wingtips alone.

IMHO the wingtips are one of the places where a lot of improvement can be made without an awfully huge amount of work.

To make some improvement, you only have to change the back half. You can leave the large radius in the front "tip bow", that's actually helping. Making the trailing edge of the wing straight all the way to the very tip (instead of curving forward) is the trick. You could basically build the new improved section on top of the old curved bow, not even removing it. Just add the little bit of structure to the rear spar and trailing edge pieces and cover over it. This is the "quick and dirty" way of course. I would bet that you would see some small measurable improvement in low speed handling or performance.

To make a little more improvement, you could remove the existing wingtip bow and make a new trapezoidal "raked" wingtip with a few degrees of dihedral angle added. Make a new airfoiled wing rib about half as large (both chord and thickness) as the last original Piper rib. The trailing edge of this new rib should be at the same spanwise location as the end of the old tip bow (no dimensional increase in span, because that opens up a can of worms in Oklahoma City). The key is that the trailing edge of this new half-size tip rib is about 6 or 8 inches AFT of the trailing edge of the rest of the wing. If the stock Pacer wing has a smaller mini rib halfway out on the tip, then re-use this rib and place it where its trailing edge is in a straight line between the Piper end rib and the new tip rib.

Two or three simple bent aluminum supports (spar extensions technically) must be added on to the existing Piper spar so the loads are carried from this tip back into the Piper front/rear spar system. It would basically be a couple of .032" aluminum pieces with bent flanges, nothing mysterious at all. Plus a MUCH simpler swept back leading edge skin, which is now no longer a compound curve.

The end of the new wingtip should also be about 4 inches higher (tip dihedral angle). At the very least it should be straight with the top surface of the wing, with all the "taper" rising up on the bottom. Ideally it should be a bit more than that, with the new tip rib a few inches up higher. The added dihedral does something... it converts the pressure differential and the energy in the outward spanwise flow on the bottom of the wing into something useful. What it does is use that energy and momentum to "throw" the wingtip vortex a few inches outward away from the wing, instead of the vortex being right on top of the wingtip. This increases the effective wingspan of the wing, without increasing the physical span of the wing (One simple definition of the effective wingspan of an aircraft is the distance between the centers of the two wingtip vortices).

This "raked tip" planform (the top view) also measurably changes the pressure field distribution of the wing in the positive direction. Meaning it opposes the energy of the wingtip vortex. Meaning the wingtip makes more lift and waits longer to stall. Meaning it makes it ideal for better efficiency in climb, AND a STOL aircraft "hang in there" better down at the stall range. The Dornier light commuter and light seaplane aircraft are using this design with great results. Have a look at the wingtip shape of any modern efficient airliner to see what they think of this concept.

The aeronautical basis for this was quantified and explained something like 25 or 30 years ago by Wil Scherumann in an article in Soaring Magazine. Scheumann's new wingtip research was immediately put into production by the leading glider manufacturer Schempp-Hirth in the Discus sailplane, which proceeded to absolutely dominate its racing class for 20 years. Every new racing sailplane uses some form of the swept back "raked" wingtip.

But for the rest of ye olde unwashed masses who are not sailplane pilots or not interested in aerodynamics... just look at the wingtip of any high performance bird out there circling around in the mountains. Hawks, Eagles, etc. etc. Nature figured out the best low speed high lift wingtip shape a long long time ago

Fabricating & installing all that, plus getting it all approved, sounds more involved than most of us wanna get. Seems a lot easier to just buy someone's STC'd wingtips & install them: Stewart, Deemer, Crosswinds, ?? I've seen a simple short Hoerner-style tip for short-wing Pipers which looked like a good one, but don't know who made it.
A friend of mine had a nice light well-rigged Pacer with stock round tips which flew really well. If it was mine, I woulda added VG's & called it good.

Isn't this what a Maule is?? I always thought the first Maules were stretched pacers with long wings???

I haven't heard that. But the bushmaster is a bushmaster. It is really called the Alaskan Bushmaster.

Reuben

Actually, the first Maules were mostly Pacers with droop wing tips and big engines. The fuselage wasn't lengthened nor were the wings extended much.

You cannot just convert a Pacer to a Producer in the Exp category. Yes it's been done, but mostly by guys who FABRICATED the new fuselage from scratch. And, in any case, the FAA has now gotten pretty strict on what meets the 51% rule.

As the man said, you'd get upside down in one of these really fast, but if that's what'll wind your watch, the Producer type airplane is a heck of a machine.

MTV

What a minute! The maule M-1 was a low wing plane so it couldn't have been made from a pacer.

mtv wrote: Actually, the first Maules were mostly Pacers with droop wing tips and big engines. The fuselage wasn't lengthened nor were the wings extended much.

"Mostly Pacers".... it's kind of hard to build a smallish 4-place tube & fabric taildragger with a round tail & NOT have it look like a Pacer. The earliest M4 Maules used an O-300-- not that big, only 10 more horses than a PA-20-135. And yeah, the M4 has a round tail, but if you look closely it is different from the Pacer. I'm not sure about the airfoil used, but the M4 used a factory metal skinned wing. Lots of differences, in fact more differences than similarities other than profile.