Building a Fly Baby from the EAA Articles
By Ron Wanttaja
The information on this page is the opinion of the author only. Neither the Experimental Aircraft Association (EAA) nor the holder of the rights to the Fly Baby design are responsible for the content on this page.
One of the requirements for contestants in the EAA design contest was to write a series of articles for EAA Sport Aviation magazine that would the instructions for building the aircraft. Pete had a technical-illustrator friend do a series of drawings for him, and wrote a series of 14 articles that presented the drawings and provided background information for construction.
At the same time, Pete put together the “commercial” version of the plans. These were expanded over the articles, being organized as step-by-step procedures. But the same figures were used, and the figures actually contain most of the information needed for building.
The EAA articles were always an alternative. But, since Pete was selling a better product for a relatively low amount of money, and getting copies of all those magazine articles was difficult, the official plans were the way to go for almost forty years.
With the spotty availability of the official plans sets since Pete Bowers’ death, one alternative often mentioned is building a plane from the EAA articles. EAA now has its entire magazine archive online, and if you’re an EAA member, you can download PDF files of the original articles for free.
Cool, huh?
Make no mistake, a set of plans would be a
better way to go. But dozens, if not hundreds, of folks did
build Fly Babies from the articles. Keep in mind you have
one big advantage, today…the Fly Baby community, in the form of
the Discussion
Group on Yahoo and the Fly Baby Facebook Group. If
you get stuck, post a question there…not only are there a number
of actual owners and builders, many of us own plans. We
can look up the section and see what Pete said about it.
Downloading the Articles
The first step is to download the magazine
articles. Go to the EAA
Sport Aviation Archiv page and click the “View PDFs of
Past Issues” section. You'll need to log in to the site,
using your EAA number.
Now, if you do a search for “Bowers” and click the “Author” option, it’ll give you links to all of Pete’s articles. The Fly Baby building series was run from December 1962 to May of 1964, so you can narrow your search down. Hit the “Submit” button, and you’ll get links to all the articles. Click a link, and a PDF file will display. You’ll be able to save the article to your own computer.
Here’s a breakdown of the EAA magazine articles vs. the organization of the plans. Note that the articles were not published in the same sequence as the plans.
|
EAA Magazine
Article Part |
Date of
Publication |
Plan Section |
Plans Topic |
|
0 |
Dec 1962 |
N/A |
Introduction |
|
1 |
Jan 1963 |
4 |
Wing |
|
2 |
Feb 1963 |
4 |
Wing |
|
3 |
March 1963 |
1 |
Fuselage |
|
4 |
April 1963 |
1 |
Fuselage |
|
5 |
May 1963 |
2 |
Landing Gear |
|
6 |
June 1963 |
3 |
Tail Surfaces |
|
7 |
July 1963 |
5 |
Power Plant |
|
8 |
Sept 1963 |
6 |
Misc Systems |
|
9 |
Nov 1963 |
6 |
Misc Systems |
|
10 |
Dec 1963 |
6 |
Misc Systems |
|
11 |
Jan 1964 |
9 |
Addenda |
|
12 |
May 1964 |
8 |
Assembly |
|
13 |
Aug 1964 |
7 |
Covering |
|
14 |
Sept 1964 |
7 |
Covering |
|
N/A |
N/A |
10 |
Biplane |
Note that the Introduction Pete published in December of 1962 is not the same one published in the plans. In the plans, he talks about working with the materials. You can find this sort of information at a number of sources.
One big difference between plans and the
articles: The figures in the
articles are not published full-size, and on the plans, they
are. The problem is, after years of
copying, the drawings in the plans aren’t the original size,
either. So you’d have to redraw the
templates, one way or the other. The
plans used to be sold with full-size rib templates…but they
aren’t, any more. So you have to
re-draw the ribs, anyway.
Helpful Data
This section contains links to some stuff that’ll help your building process.
- Materials List: One thing missing in the EAA articles is the list of materials contained at the start of each section of the plans. This is a link to an Excel spreadsheet that contains my stab at the materials needed to build. Each material includes what portions of the plan it’s on, so you can make a relatively easy stab at what each portion needs. Don’t have Excel? OpenOffice is a free package that is completely compatible with Microsoft products.
- Figure Corrections: While the text of the plans and the text of the articles don’t really match, the Figures are identical. As you go through the articles, you’ll notice the figure numbers are weird… In the first article for instance, you’ll be looking at Figures labeled “4-1, 4-2,” etc, while the 5th article has Figures 2-1, 2-2, etc. The artwork in the articles is labeled the way it is in the plans, rather than using a separate numbering scheme for the articles. That makes it a lot easier. Plus, Pete was meticulous about marking on the plans when a page changed…you see a “Revised April 1970” note, etc. at the bottom of the page. So if Pete didn’t issue a revision…we can assume the figures didn’t change from the original EAA articles. Even better, Pete made the corrections by hand, himself, rather than re-drawing the entire figures or having his technical-illustrator friend do it. So it was relatively easy to page through the plans, find changed figures, and compare them to the figures in the original articles. This will open as a PDF file.
Questions? Email Ron Wanttaja .
