In 2002, Jon Swenson happened upon a Tri-Q project on eBay that had suffered severe nosegear damage on its maiden landing. It was only after he had won the auction and brought the project home that he discovered his dream machine had been orphaned by the manufacturer.
Pilot Nathan Peck flies his single seat Quickie—the tiny airplane that started it all. (Photo: Steve Schulte)
For Jon Swenson, the Quickie adventure began with an eBay ad for a damaged airframe. Picking up someone else’s kit is one way to adopt an orphan.
Often when a kit manufacturer goes out of business and can no longer support its builders, many projects go abandoned in a hangar or garage. Eventually, they get sold on a secondary market. If you have some restoration skills, and an active builder community still exists, you might actually be able to find and transform a diamond in the rough.
When you fall in love with one of these orphaned beauties, it is always wise to do a little research before you lay out your hard-earned cash. However, many would-be builders, like Jon, simply can’t resist, and bring that dream project home with little or no knowledge about the particular design prior to having it in their lives. This can mean that their dream soon becomes a nightmare that sits in their hangar or garage. But Jon was lucky; he discovered with a quick Internet search that the composite Quickie, and its subsequent incarnations, are still actively supported by a tight-knit group of builders.
By doing additional research on the community’s website, he was pleased to see that the two-place Quickie also met his desired mission in several key areas. Namely, the Tri-Q200 had good range, was reasonably fast, and inexpensive to both build and operate. He also liked the design’s trailerable concept that would keep him from having to rent a hangar, further reducing the cost of ownership.
Jon Swenson and his Corvair-engined Quickie project.
After inspecting the airframe more closely, Jon made a quick list of the items that needed to be sourced or repaired. The list included a firewall-forward package, engine cowling, front nosegear, and new paint. Jon wasn’t intimidated by the list since he already had a long history of working on cars and trucks. When he was 14, his grandfather gave him a box of tools and an old Model T engine to take apart, just to see how it worked. From that point on, he performed all of the maintenance and upkeep on the family cars; therefore he felt at home not only rebuilding an engine, but also performing all of the little tasks required to make his latest project airworthy again.
Jon’s initial need for economy prompted a decision to utilize a Corvair auto engine conversion as the powerplant. At the time, he couldn’t have envisioned $10,000 in one lump sum to spend on an engine. The Corvair conversion allowed him to build an airworthy engine and pay for the parts over time.
The Corvair engine itself has a long history of conversion for aircraft use. Bernie Pietenpol is credited with installing a Corvair engine in one of his ubiquitous wood and fabric homebuilts the same year the car was introduced to the public, 40 years ago. However, for Bernie, the engine wasn’t so much of a conversion, as it was simply strapping a car engine on the front end of an airplane.
Contemporary Corvair conversions have come a long way, and again have an active support community. William Wynne, the self-proclaimed Corvair authority, has nurtured that community and helped builders take much of the guesswork out of their own conversions, with time-tested components. Jon elected to use several of Wynne’s parts on his own engine, including the prop hub, hybrid studs and dual-point distributor.
A custom engine requires a custom mount —and on an orphaned kit, this requires design and fabrication skills.
But even with support, changing the engine from a Continental O-200, as called for in plans, to the Corvair was a bigger challenge than Jon could have imagined at the outset. The Corvair engine hadn’t yet been successfully flown in a Quickie, so the decision meant that he was blazing a new trail and would need to design several custom parts to successfully get the engine installed. However, that decision lead to what Jon says were the most interesting and rewarding parts of the project.
In turn, it also gave him an opportunity to not only receive help from the community, but also become a contributing member and share what he’s learned. The Corvair and Quickie groups both have an active online presence, and anyone can communicate with other builders and share answers quickly using their e-mail lists. This helped Jon avoid common pitfalls, and also helped him overcome challenges specific to his airframe.
The first challenge was designing and fabricating an engine mount. Wynne provides the dimensions for the engine tray in his conversion manual, but the attach points had to be fabricated from scratch for the unique dimensions of the Quickie’s firewall.
Adapting an orphaned kit for a new engine means custom fiberglass work for a cowl that will fit. Here, Swenson used wood and expanding foam to make a plug.
Using Wynne’s tray dimensions as a starting point, Jon did some preliminary calculations to rough out an initial design. The first prototype was built from PVC pipe and tested for fit and strength. Modifications were made in three subsequent steel designs, and the final mount was welded from lightweight 4130 tubing. Then, not simply trusting his own eyeball engineering, Jon fabricated a test beam, per Wynne’s construction manual, to put the equivalent of 10 Gs of load on his final design. He continuously measured the run-out and noted that it returned to its original shape after un-loading.
When Jon removed the damaged nosegear, he noted that the bolt holes in the gear-mount plate that held the nosegear to the firewall had become elongated. This suggested that the mount plate was twisting back and forth and needed to be strengthened. To facilitate this, he connected the main horizontal cross member of his motor mount to the nosegear plate via two steel support tabs. This simple modification significantly strengthened the nosegear, without adding significant weight. With another quick query to the group, Jon was able to locate a new nosegear for his project.
Once the final engine mount and nosegear were installed, Jon began work on the conversion of his engine core. For the most part, he stuck with Wynne’s construction manual, but made a few modifications to ensure some components would fit under a cowl without any major bumps or warts. One departure from the manual that Jon developed was a rear-mounted starter, rather than using Wynne’s front-mounted design.
He also custom fabricated several other parts for his engine. These include the pressure plenum that helps direct cooler air over the cylinder barrels, the filtration system for the oil cooler, and an aluminum bracket that serves the dual purpose of retaining the distributor and holding the tach sensor in position. Once all that was finished, he created custom intake and exhaust manifolds.
By the time he started the engine for the first time in 2010, Wynne had generated two significant ADs for the Corvair conversion. The first was to have the crankshaft ion-nitride hardened, and the second was the installation of a front fifth bearing kit to help distribute the propeller loads on the crank. Undaunted, Jon disassembled the engine, and sent his crankshaft out to the vendor, then waited nearly nine months to get it back. When the crankshaft eventually returned, Jon was able to reassemble the engine and install the fifth bearing. He found that the fifth bearing installation was not difficult, but the precision required was a little nerve racking.
The first start of a new engine is always special—in this case, even more so because the installation was the builder’s own design.
The next major task was to fit all of those custom engine components under a custom-made cowl. The original cowl had been badly damaged in the hard landing incident, but Jon was able to use pieces of it to fashion a new one that fit the longer six-cylinder engine block. With the engine bolted temporarily in its mount, he attached a plywood mockup of the nose bowl to the front of the engine and ran stringers back to the firewall.
Next he protected the engine with sheets of plastic and began filling large voids with hard insulating foam and smaller gaps with expanding foam. From there he could rough out a more pleasing shape, then finalize and smooth the finished design with a mixture of hard-setting spackling compound (Sheetrock mud) and latex paint. From that plug, he created a female mold, and finally a finished cowl. To create the front air inlets, he turned a couple of pieces of large aluminum tubing on his grandfather’s 1941 Atlas lathe. The cowling fabrication alone required several months.
Early in the project, Jon was determined not to change anything that he felt was already airworthy, but in reality, he confessed to making a few unnecessary upgrades. As any long-term builder will discover, new information, techniques and products become available and there is a very strong desire to incorporate as many of them as possible.
The original cockpit of the orphaned kit featured traditional round gauges and discrete radios.
For example, Jon finished one entire instrument panel installation on his Q before taking a job building wiring harnesses and panels for other homebuilders at SteinAir. No sooner had he gotten his own panel wired, when his boss made him a deal on a Dynon D10A and EMS that he simply couldn’t refuse. So he had to completely redesign the panel around the new digital instruments.
The engine, nosegear, and cowl took several years of part-time work to complete, but for Jon the most tedious part of the project so far has been prepping the composite structure for paint. At first glance, the majority of the airframe seemed to have only minor cosmetic damage. However, as many adoptive builders will discover, what lies beneath that pristine looking exterior could actually be problematic. When it came time for Jon to remove the flying surfaces and prepare them for paint, it was apparent that the pivot points had become so rusted they would need to be cut off. However, because of the builder community, Jon was able to purchase updated drawings for the missing steel parts on the Quickie Builders Association web site, and make new ones as needed.
The redesigned instrument panel hints that the builder works in an avionics shop.
Jon spent the last two years filling, sanding, and priming the composite structure in preparation for paint. He was a little disappointed when the initial paint color didn’t meet his high standards, but he decided to bring it out to the airport for final assembly anyway. There will be plenty of time next winter to repaint if necessary. He is expected to receive the final inspection and begin Phase I flight testing by early summer.
What Jon’s example proves is that you can sometimes find an incredible deal on an orphaned kit. Ideally you would perform research prior to buying any kit, but with support from the builder community, a touch of ingenuity, and a whole lot of elbow grease, it is possible to make your dream of plane ownership a reality.
The genesis of Quickie Aircraft Corporation (QAC) began in 1975 when B1 test pilot Tom Jewett, and fellow pilot and friend Gene Sheehan, began searching for a small, efficient, and reliable engine to use in an un-designed airframe. Together they looked at many small two- and four-stroke engines used to power all sorts of machines, from chain saws and lawn mowers, to small vehicles. They eventually settled on an 18 horsepower industrial generator motor produced by Onan, and asked Burt Rutan to design an aircraft around it.
The original Q2 sported a tailwheel and main landing gear on the tips of the canard.
Burt was impressed with the engine’s reliability, and came up with a tailless tractor design, with the pilot and fuel near the center of gravity. It had a canard and main wing of nearly equal area arranged in a biplane-looking configuration. The main landing gear legs were moved out to the tips of the canard to reduce weight and complexity for the homebuilder. Thinking that this new design would be relatively fast and easy to construct, they settled on the name Quickie. Tom and Gene introduced the aircraft to the public at Oshkosh in 1978, and it won the award for Outstanding New Design. At that point, Quickie Aircraft Corporation became an entity and began selling kits.
Soon after, people began asking QAC to produce a two-seat version, but those requests were met with initial reluctance. The void was filled a few years later by a startup called Viking Aircraft; they produced a scaled-up version of the Quickie planform called the Dragonfly. The Dragonfly won the Outstanding New Design award at Oshkosh in 1980.
The original single-place Quickie quickened the pulse of many young pilots in the 1980s.
Not to be outdone, with the help of Canadian builder Gary LeGare, QAC introduced a two-seat version of the Quickie in September, 1980. The Q2, as it was dubbed, had a higher overall wing loading than the Dragonfly, and ended up being 100 pounds lighter and about 40mph faster, with approximately the same horsepower.
However, several problems with the original Quickie and Q2 designs became apparent as more builders took to the air. For example, due to poor ground handling, many builders were experiencing loss-of-control accidents while performing their initial high speed taxi tests. In addition, the original canard with GU airfoil was prone to a loss of lift when the leading edge was contaminated with bugs, or when flying in rain. The GU canard also required tight manufacturing tolerances to avoid additional loss in performance. Those tolerances often exceeded the skill level of many amateur builders.
Many of these design problems weren’t completely resolved until several years later by the builder community. (See “Community Mods” below.) However, QAC began testing an improved LS1 airfoil for the Q2 canard in October 1982, and made the modification available to the builder community in January, 1983. The improved airfoil was thinner and required a carbon fiber spar to support the landing loads. The improved performance of the new canard allowed QAC to increase the gross weight and replace the Revmaster engine with a 100 hp Continental O-200. The improved design was sold as an upgraded kit known as the Q-200.
Quickie Aircraft Corporation eventually won a lawsuit brought by one of its customers, but was forced to file for bankruptcy in October, 1986, and ceased operations due to mounting legal expenses. The result of their federal case (Mullan v. Quickie Aircraft Corp., 10th Cir. 1986) is still cited in many similar cases involving product liability.
—D.Y.
Quickies may have been long abandoned by the company that produced them, but they certainly have a loyal following of builders and flyers. The Quickie Builders Association has been continuously producing a bi-monthly newsletter for over 30 years. The Association was formed in 1982 when two early builders, Jim Masal and Robert Herd, noticed that several safety concerns that they had heard through the grapevine, were not being addressed directly by Quickie Aircraft Corporation.
The original tailwheel spring was fiberglass and the rigging was such that if the spring broke, the pilot lost both tailwheel steering and rudder control. (Photo: Kip Laurie)
They started publishing a newsletter that provided a forum for builders to share ideas and keep the manufacturer honest. Efforts were continually coordinated to make the designs faster, more reliable, and safer. This was done long before e-mail and other forms of electronic communication were available, and have continued long after the kits were orphaned by the manufacturer.
Those efforts have paid off and resulted in many hard-won lessons and off-plans modifications that have actually improved the safety of the original designs. For example, when builders started to report ground handling problems, they banded together and found a solution. The Q2 plans stated that the axle holes for the mainwheels, at the extreme ends of the canard, should be aligned while the canard was still in the construction jig. However, when the aircraft was loaded to near-max gross weight, the canard would actually bend under load. This caused the mainwheels to splay outward and throw off the alignment so carefully set by the builder in his workshop. The solution to the ground-handling problem was to simply perform the wheel alignment while the airframe was loaded and the canard was under load.
Many builders have adopted a community-designed alternative that replaces the tailwheel spring and re-rigs the rudder and tailwheel steering cables so that the pilot retains rudder control, should the tailwheel fail. (Photo: Jim Patillo)
In addition, many builders were complaining that the per-plans tailspring would eventually break. This was a serious concern, because if you built the airplane per the plans, when the tailspring broke, you also lost rudder control. Upon landing, many pilots found themselves heading down the runway at high speed with no directional control. The solution was to replace the fiberglass tailspring with steel tubing and split the control cables, so that the rudder and tailwheel were controlled independently.
To further improve ground handling, most builders also replaced the plan’s single brake handle with independent toe brakes, and installed what the Quickie community calls an aileron reflexor. The aileron reflexor, in effect, creates aerodynamic flaperons that adjust the trailing edge of both ailerons either up or down. This allows the pilot to put more downward pressure on the tailwheel (for better ground handling), or adjust the canard’s angle of attack and account for changes in c.g. (during flight.)
In eight short years, Quickie Aircraft Corporation is reported to have sold over 4000 kits. If you consider that only 20% of kit aircraft from that era were completed and successfully flown, there remain a vast number of kits still in the wild, waiting to be finished by some enthusiastic individual, and supported by an even more enthusiastic community.
—D.Y.
The last time I had been in a Quickie (actually a trigear Q-200) was probably 25 years ago when my Grumman Yankee shared a hangar with a neighbor’s sleek little white plane. They fit very well together in that T-hangar—the wings and canard overlapping in a way that saved us both a lot of hangar rent. But that was a long time and many flying hours ago, so to get a modern perspective, I arranged to visit Bruce Crain, a veritable Johnny Appleseed of the Quickie community. Bruce keeps his beautiful little airplane near his home in Enid, Oklahoma, a land of endless farms that seem to be growing wind turbines.
Bruce Crain’s Quickie sports the nosewheel conversion, an O-200 engine, and an electric MT prop. It is an excellent cruiser that he uses for frequent cross-country travel.
Fortunately, the winds for our evening flight were reasonably low and steady, making for a smooth atmosphere in which to enjoy an airplane whose lines can be described the same way—smooth. The sculpted shape of the fuselage and flying surfaces can only be attained (reasonably) by the use of composites, and the designers of the Quickie clearly took full advantage of the material. Every curve and line was designed to cheat the air from draggy toeholds, and the airplane definitely is fast for its horsepower.
Bruce’s Quickie was converted from its original taildragger configuration into a nosewheel airplane, and sports a Continental O-200 engine swinging an electric MT prop. This all fits in a very compact package which seats two in a semi-supine position. Climbing in required a step on the maingear leg and a hand press on the aft cockpit bulkhead, but felt very natural. I was quickly seated comfortably on the right side and had plenty of room for my average-sized frame. The left and right seats share a center-mounted control stick on the console, but only the pilot’s side (on the left) has engine controls and brakes. Bruce’s airplane has conventional steam gauges, but also some modern, inexpensive extras like an autopilot and electronic engine instrumentation.
The view from the cockpit is good, although with the laid-back position, looking to the rear and down low on the sides is a little more difficult than in a bubble-canopied airplane with more upright seating. The sky view was magnificent however, and any limitations down and to the sides could be fixed with a bank in that direction. I found that I never really saw the main wing, and the canard didn’t really come in to play visually. The compact nature of the airplane had us sitting fairly low to the ground—it felt much like a single-place sailplane to me—something I wanted to remember in the flare.
Bruce quickly had us rolling with the sure and steady manner of someone at home after many hours in a particular cockpit. Cleared for take-off, we accelerated at a reasonable pace (for an O-200 powered airplane) and shortly after rotation, Bruce asked me to take the stick and head us out to survey some farmland he owns a few miles out of town. With Bruce coordinating the turns, I was simply controlling pitch and roll as we climbed to 3000 feet. The airplane felt speedy, but pitch forces were a little heavier then I would have assumed for an airplane this size. It was stable however, with little tendency to hunt or over-control. Roll forces were heavier still—very unexpected with so little roll moment of inertia. But again, it was stable in this axis. Turning about a particular farm field was easy and it actually felt like I was flying a much heavier (and stable) aircraft.
Before returning to land, Bruce suggested that we try a couple of stalls, and having never done them in a canard aircraft, I was interested to see how they would feel. True to form, with the power pulled back, the canard stalled first, dropping the nose and allowing the main wing to keep flying. There was more nose drop than I expected, but not as much as in most conventional (tail in back) airplanes. With the stick held back, the airplane began to stall and drop the nose repetitively, with each cycle becoming bit more pronounced. Recognizing and correcting the stall was a no-brainer, however, and control was good throughout.
World’s smallest refueling probe? No, that is the vent for the fuselage-mounted header tank.
As we approached the field, Bruce suggested a speed of about 100 mph until very short final, and told me it was mine to land. It was actually a bit of a partnership, since all I had was a stick, while he handled yaw and power. With a fairly flat approach due to the speed, and the low-to-the-ground seating, I flared just a touch high, but found that feeling for the ground in the float was not an issue, and the landing was uneventful. Bruce had warned me that the landings would be firm (carrier-like was the term he used in our preflight briefing), but I was happy with the touchdown, and all of my fillings were still intact as we added power for a touch-and-go. I always enjoy watching a master work, so I suggested that Bruce take the second and final landing. I was not disappointed, as he clearly had the flight path, speeds, and power figured out to get himself quickly around the pattern and back on the ground.
All in all, I found the Quickie to be a stable cross-country machine with a solid feel. The controls are heavier than I expected on such a small craft, but for its purpose (a compact, efficient, cross-country cruiser), it works well. While not a short-field airplane due to the higher stall speed, it would be great for throwing a couple of days of clothing in the back and heading off to visit family (one of Bruce’s regular missions) a few hundred miles away. All airplanes are designed for a niche, and if you want to get there without burning a lot of gas, the Quickies could fill that purpose.
—Paul Dye
