A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, I took a trial flight in a VPM M-16. It was a lot of fun, but I couldn't bear to deal with the maintenance requirements of the 4 cylinder, 2 stroke engine. After flying the Flightstar for over 8 years, I passed my gyro endorsement in a Rotax 914 powered Magni M-16 (pretty much the same aircraft as the VPM, more modern engine) and started thinking about getting a gyroplane. I had originally thought about getting a single seater and keeping the Flightstar, but then Ken announced he was selling his Magni, so I ended up getting a Magni instead of having 2 aircraft.
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First up, it needed converting.
We (well, Ken designed, Jim made) made up a pulley system to convert the cable movement from a twistgrip throttle to a forward and back movement to attach to the stock throttle system. This took a lot of tweaking to get the gear ratio right - the 914 has springs that pull the throttles open, which meant closing the throttle was... tricky. I modified the Motion Pro twistgrip to give us more motion, and Ken added a return spring, and it's a lot better.
We added a lever for the brake (I figure the only time I'll need to use it is to take the parking brake off while pre-rotating).
We discovered the stock pre-rotator lever (left) hit the throttle, so I wouldn't be able to get it all the way in. Jim machined up a longer one that'll clear the throttle (right). It's also a match for the brake lever design, as obviously that's important to me :o)
We got everything installed, and tweaked some little issues. I did the number of hours with an instructor that the insurance company required, and soloed it. I've had a few problems with the brakes dragging, and I think that's mostly sorted. It gets hard to move it in and out of the hangar, plus it's flat spotted a tyre where it should have spun up fast enough to prevent that happening. Maybe one day I'll spring the $3K for the Beringer brakes - Chris has them on his and they seem nice.
It's been a few years, and hundreds of hours with no problems other than regular maintenance work. That's all pretty easy, the worst thing was the 5 year Rotax rubber replacement, which was fiddly more than difficult. Ken and I did the rotor head bearing replacement (the factory recommend an inspection at 1,000 hours, then every 200 hours after that, but we figured if the rotor's coming off to be inspected, we can just put new bearings in and be good for another 1,000 hours), so now I should be good for the next few years.
I discovered that my Garmin Aera 796 GPS could set the frequency on the Funke ATR-833 radio via the SL40 interface, so I decided I had to make that work. It was also a good time to hardwire the GDL-39 ADS-B in device.
I installed a Garmin 010-11756-01 bare wire connector between the GPS and the radio:
TX2 (orange) -> pin #9 on the radio
RX2 (purple) -> pin #21 on the radio
I added an audio out socket:
Audio right (white)
Audio left (brown)
Audio common (green)
and wired it to a Garmin 010-11686-40 GDL39 power / bare wire connector:
TX1 (blue) -> white/green
RX1 (yellow) -> green
Power's red, ground's black. It all works as I'd hoped :o)
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